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If We Want A Book To Do More Than What It Does, That's A Condemnation. If We Want It To Do More Of What It Does, That's An Endorsement.

-Clive James

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If We Want A

Clive James

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If We Want A Book To Do More Than What It Does, That's A Condemnation. If We Want It To Do More Of What It Does, That's An Endorsement.

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More From Clive James

It Is Almost Better To Be An Impulse Shirt-buyer Than An Impulse Shoe-buyer. I Have Worn Shirts That Made People Think I Was A Retired Mafia Hit-man Or A Yugoslavian Sports Convener From Split, But I Have Worn Shoes That Made People Think I Was Insane.

Reading And Writing... Are Exciting. The Most Exciting Things I Can Think Of. And Now, As I Reflect... I Have To Say That I've Been Lucky In That I'm Amused By What I Do - Sufficiently Amused.

How Much Atonement Is Enough? The Bombing Must Be Allowed As At Least Part-payment: Those Of Our Young People Who Are Concerned About The Moral Problem Posed By The Allied Air Offensive Should At Least Consider The Moral Problem That Would Have Been Posed If The German Civilian Population Had Not Suffered At All.

A Traditional Fixture At Wimbledon Is The Way The Bbc Tv Commentary Box Fills Up With British Players Eliminated In The Early Rounds.

I Was A Big Pothead For A Short Period. That Was What Ticked Me Off That I Shouldn't Go Near Hard Drugs, Actually, Because I Would Consume The Stuff As If It Was Going Out Of Style And It Rapidly Occurred To Me That If I Ever Tried A Hard Drug, The Same Thing Would Happen, So I Never Did.

Men Never Sound More Stupid Than When They're Telling You They're A Very Complex Personality.

The Great Thing About Living Until You Get A Bit Older If You Are A Writer, And Especially A Poet, Is That You Have More Life To Reflect On. And I Think That If I Am Better Now - And I Think That I Am Probably Better Than I Was - Is Because That I Simply Have More To Think About, More To Get Under Control, More To Understand.

Roscoe Tanner Seems To Have Found A Way Of Making His Service Go Even Faster, So That The Ball Is Now Quite Invisible, Like Stealth, The American Supersonic Bomber Which Nobody Has Ever Seen.

When I Was Very Young, One Of My Favourite Books Was Captain's Courageous And I Suppose One Of The Reasons I Loved It, It Was A Life I Knew I Should Have Had, Learning All The Different Bits Of The Ship And Learning To Catch Fish And Rig Sails And To -all The Things That I Never Learned And I Never Learned The Discipline, But I Hungered After It.

When I Was Young I Never Believed That Australia Was Anything Else Except Blessed. I Thought It Was A Little Dull When I Was Young, But That Was 'cause I Was A Snob.

I Try To Be Specific. One Thought At A Time. Clear. Articulate. And Above All, Memorable, If You Can Be. You'd Like To Write Phrases That People Can't Forget As Soon As They Read Them.

The British Hamburger Thus Symbolised, With Savage Neatness, The Country's Failure To Provide Its Ordinary People With Food Which Did Anything More For Them Than Sustain Life.

She Wasn't Just Beautiful. She Was Like The Sun Coming Up: Coming Up Giggling. She Was Giggling As If She Had Just Remembered Something Funny.

His Pear-shaped Head, I Could Now See, Was Situated On Top Of A Pear-shaped Body, Which His Black Gown Caused To Resemble A Piece Of Fruit Going To A Funeral.

Arnold Schwarzenegger Looks Like A Brown Condom Full Of Walnuts.

Common Sense And A Sense Of Humour Are The Same Thing, Moving At Different Speeds. A Sense Of Humour Is Just Common Sense, Dancing. Those Who Lack Humour Are Without Judgment And Should Be Trusted With Nothing.

The Secret For An Artist Is To Make That A Subject And Not Bang Your Head Against The Wall And Give Up. But To Turn It Into And Treat The New Subject Matter, Which Is One's Own Vanishing.

When You Cut It Up, Put The Pieces In Your Mouth And Swallowed Them, The British Hamburger Shaped Itself To The Bottom On Your Stomach Like Ballast, While Interacting With Your Gastric Juices To Form An Incipient Belch Of Enormous Potential, An Airship Which Had Been Inflated In A Garage. This Belch, When Silently Released, Would Cause People Standing Twenty Yards Away To Start Examining The Soles Of Their Shoes. The Vocalized Version Sounded Like A Bag Of Tools Thrown Into A Bog.

Stop Worrying, Nobody Gets Out Of This World Alive.

Funny Inspirational

The Benson And Hedges Cup Was Won By Mcenroe ... He Was As Charming As Always, Which Means That He Was As Charming As A Dead Mouse In A Loaf Of Bread.

Jimmy Connors Likes The Ball To Come At Him In A Straight Line, So That He Can Hit It Back In Another Straight Line. When It Comes To Him In A Curve, He Uses Up Half Of His Energy Straightening It Up Again.

All Intellectual Tendencies Are Corrupted When They Consort With Power.

I Was Brought Up On The Proletarian Left, And I Remain There. The Fair Go For Workers Is Fundamental, And I Don't Believe The Free Market Has A Mind.

The Inevitable Effect Of A Biographer's Hindsight Is To Belittle The Subject's Foresight.

The Rattle Of Plastic Keys Reminds Me Of A Squadron Of Butterflies Failing To Fight Their Way Out Of A Paper Bag.

A Loose Horse Is Any Horse Sensible Enough To Get Rid Of Its Rider At An Early Stage And Carry On Unencumbered.

Whoever Called Snooker "chess With Balls" Was Rude, But Right.

John Mcenroe Has Hair Like Badly Turned Broccoli.

Writing Is A Performance Art For Me. They're Very Closely Aligned, Writing And Performing. But I'm A Writer, Not A Performer.

The Entrée Wasn't Tender Enough To Be A Paving Stone And The Gravy Couldn't Have Been Primordial Soup Because Morphogenesis Was Already Taking Place.

Like Most People Who Smoked Umpteen Cigarettes A Day, I Tasted Only The First One. The Succeeding Umpteen Minus One Were A Compulsive Ritual Which Had No Greater Savour Than The Fumes Of Burning Money.

"nationwide" Featured An Amazing Collection Of Apprentice Impersonators. From All Over Britain, Schoolchildren Materialised Via Local Studios To Give Us Their Imitations Of The Mighty. There Were At Least Three Uncannily Accurate Margaret Thatchers, Their Eyelids Fatigued With Condescension And Their Voices Swooping And Whining Like Dive-bombers.

I Think The Great Trick Of Doing My Sort Of Thing Is To Learn To Use Your Downtime, And Of Course In The Media And Especially In Television, There's A Heck Of A Lot Of Time Of Waiting Around. And I Think The Trick Is To Use That.

Writers Quite Often Starve. And I'm Mainly Just Writing Critical Prose And Poetry, That's A Formula For Starvation.

Prose And Poetry

Not Everyone Who Wants To Make A Film Is Crazy, But Almost Everyone Who Is Crazy Wants To Make A Film.

Once, Bbc Television Had Echoed Bbc Radio In Being A Haven For Standard English Pronunciation. Then Regional Accents Came In: A Democratic Plus. Then Slipshod Usage Came In: An Egalitarian Minus. By Now Slovenly Grammar Is Even More Rife On The Bbc Channels Than On Itv. In This Regard A Decline Can Be Clearly Charted... If The Bbc, Once The Guardian Of The English Language, Has Now Become Its Most Implacable Enemy, Let Us At Least Be Grateful When The Massacre Is Carried Out With Style.

She [marilyn Monroe] Was Good At Being Inarticulately Abstracted For The Same Reason That Midgets Are Good At Being Short.

Philosophers Are Divided On The Question Of Whether The Narrative Therein Unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] Is Grippingly Boring Or Boringly Gripping.

Television Is Simultaneously Blamed, Often By The Same People, For Worsening The World And For Being Powerless To Change It.

I Was Wrong, However, To Suppose That Sellers Thought The World Revolved Around Him. He Thought The Cosmos Did Too, And History, And The Fates... Like Every Egomaniac, He Behaved As If Everybody Else Spent Their Day Being As Interested In Him As He Was.

All Television Ever Did Was Shrink The Demand For Ordinary Movies. The Demand For Extraordinary Movies Increased. If Any One Thing Is Wrong With The Movie Industry Today, It Is The Unrelenting Effort To Astonish.

The Streets, At Least In This Part Of Town, Seemed Impossibly Clean In Comparison To London. The Public Telephones Were Unvandalised. For A London Telephone Booth To Look Like That It Would Have To Be Guarded Around The Clock By The Sas.

One Of The Virtues Of The Nhs... It Doesn't Worry You About Money At The Moment When You're Least Capable Of Doing Anything About It.

I Won't Have To Miss Smoking Any More. Nobody Smokes Where I'm Going: It's Like A Row Of Restaurants In California.

It Is Only When They Go Wrong That Machines Remind You How Powerful They Are.

Anyone Afraid Of What He Thinks Television Does To The World Is Probably Just Afraid Of The World.

Twin Miracles Of Mascara, Her Eyes Looked Like The Corpses Of Two Small Crows That Had Crashed Into A Chalk Cliff.

Experts Say Men Think Of Sex Every 10 Seconds... What Do They Think Of In The Other Nine?

Everyone Has A Right To A University Degree In America, Even If It's In Hamburger Technology.

Snooker Is Just Chess With Balls.

Being Young Is Wonderful. But One Of The Secrets Of Being A Human Individual - A Mature Human Individual Shall We Put It Rather Grandly - Is That You Can See This Desire In Perspective.

The Canadian Version Of Julius Caesar's Memoirs? I Came, I Saw, I Coped.

The Essence Of A Class System Is Not That The Privileged Are Conscious Of Their Privileges, But That The Deprived Are Conscious Of Their Deprivations.

All I Can Do Is Turn A Phrase Until It Catches The Light.

Fiction Is Life With The Dull Bits Left Out.

Jack Aubrey Is A Tremendous Tower Of Strength And You Always Want To Read About Him.

Pound Had Argued - And Eliot Had Helped Him Prove - That A Poem Could Be Sustained By Memorable Moments. Olson Proved That It Could Be Sustained By Unmemorable Ones, Provided That The Texture Of The Accumulated Jottings Avoided The Sound Of Failed Poetry.

Disco Dancing Is Just The Steady Thump Of A Giant Moron Knocking In An Endless Nail.

The Language Laboratory At Cambridge Is A Very Good Way Of Finding Out About Grammar And The Vocabulary And That's Why I Learned To Read German And Later On I Added Spanish, The Standard European Languages.

A Life Without Fame Can Be A Good Life, But Fame Without A Life Is No Life At All.

The Literary Critic, Or The Critic Of Any Other Specific Form Of Artistic Expression, May Detach Himself From The World For As Long As The Work Of Art He Is Contemplating Appears To Do The Same.

You Can Never Get A Woman To Sit Down And Listen To A Drum Solo.

As Far As Talent Goes, Marilyn Monroe Was So Minimally Gifted As To Be Almost Unemployable, And Anyone Who Holds To The Opinion That She Was A Great Natural Comic Identifies Himself Immediately As A Dunce.

My Wife And I Just Started Listening To The Late Beethoven Quartets Together, An Activity I Recommend For All Married Couples, But That Doesn't Really Mean That I'm Finished Reading.

Sick Of Being A Prisoner Of My Childhood, I Want To Put It Behind Me.

My Wife Spoke Perfect Italian And She Was Very Beautiful And Very Suave Italian Men Were Crowding Around Her, Talking All The Time And If I Was To Even Understand What Was Going On, I Had To Learn The Language Fast.

My Niece Is - Her Name Is Sasha, Is Currently Learning Russian At Melbourne University And I Look Forward To The Day When I Can Talk To Her About Pushkin.

One Way Or Another, All The Poets Of The Thirties And Forties Reacted To Auden, Either By Rejecting Him Or Trying To Absorb Him.

Freedom And Diversity Guard Each Other, And If A Country Could Form The Whole Of One's Character, Napoleon Iii And Victor Hugo Would Have Been The Same Person... If National Identity Means Anything, It Means Something That Comes With You Wherever You Go, And Stays With You No Matter How Long You Stay Away.

In Italy, For The Same Price As A Typical British Hamburger Meal Including Sweet, A Builder's Labourer Could Eat Like A King - Rather Better In Fact, Because Pasta Dishes Gain From Being Kept Simple.

If The Humanism That Makes Civilization Civilized Is To Be Preserved Into The New Century, It Will Need Advocates. These Advocates Will Need A Memory, And Part Of That Memory Will Need To Be Of An Age In Which They Were Not Yet Alive.

Sometimes I Feel If I Was Young Again, I Would Wrap A Bandana Around My Head Like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. And I Would Become A Pirate Of The Web. And I Would Go Around Stealing Poems And Assembling Into One Spot Like A Treasure Cave.

Delivering The State Of The Union? That Bloke Couldn't Deliver Pizza.

The Smartest Move I Ever Made In Showbusiness Was To Start Off Looking Like The Kind Of Wreck I Would End Up As. I Was Already Aged In The Wood.

A Sceptic Finds Dallas Absurd. A Cynic Thinks The Public Doesn't

When I Finally Embraced Abstinence It Was Because Of The Simple Urge To Work A Longer Day. Thus, Without Joining Alcoholics Anonymous, I Was At Last Able To Leave Piss-artists Notorious.

As A Work Of Art, It Reminds Me Of A Long Conversation Between Two Drunks

The Thing About Making A Documentary In Las Vegas Is There Isn't Much To Film Apart From Other People Making Documentaries About Las Vegas.

In The Twelfth Century The Basque Fishermen Of Biarritz Used To Hunt Whales With Deadly Efficiency. When The Whales Sensibly Moved Away, The Basques Chased Them Further And Further, With The Consequence That The Fishermen Of Biarritz Discovered America Before Columbus Did. This Is A Matter For Local Pride But On A Larger View It Is Not Quite So Stunning, Since With The Possible Exception Of The Swiss Everybody Discovered America Before Columbus Did.

If An Artist Is Any Good At All, Then He Or She Will Have A Later Phase That's More Interesting Than The Early One.

Murray Sounds Like A Blindfolded Man Riding A Unicycle On The Rim Of The Pit Of Doom, The Men Actually Facing The Danger Are All So Taciturn That You Might As Well Try Interviewing The Cars Themselves.

All Honest Labor Becomes Easy; It Only Becomes Hard When Done With Unwillingness.

She Was Good At Playing Abstract Confusion In The Same Way That A Midget Is Good At Being Short.

Little Books Are The Things To Write At My Age, I've Decided. Avoid The Big Ones, Go For The Little Ones.

I Saw The Film Pearl Harbour And It Made Me Wish That The Japanese Had Bombed Hollywood Instead!

The British Secret Service Was Staffed At One Point Almost Entirely By Alcoholic Homosexuals Working For The Kgb

An Education Without A Bible Education Is No Education.

First-rate Science Fiction Was, And Remains, More Interesting Than Second-rate Art.

I'm Certainly Not A Linguist. I Learned What Languages I Could Learn In Order To Read Books And I Can't Really Speak Them. I Couldn't Have Stayed Out Of Jail In Most Of Them.

The Provincial Intellectual Is Doomed To Arguing At Low Level... There Is Still No Australian Literary World, Not In Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. It Is Some Consolation To Realise That There Is No Literary World In Birmingham Or Los Angeles Either. I Have Heard There Is One In Montreal, But I Don't Believe It. The Literary World Is In London And New York, The Only Cities Big Enough To Sustain Magazines Which Can Afford To Reject Copy.

This Quality Becomes Important At A Time When Almost Everyone Is A Poet. And As I Said, We Live In An Age Where Almost Everybody Is A Poet, But Scarcely Anyone Can Write A Poem.

Ban Poetry. And Make Sure That Anyone Caught Reading It Is Expelled From School. Then It Will Acquire The Glamour.

Generally It Is Our Failures That Civilize Us. Triumph Confirms Us In Our Habits.

John Mcenroe Looks As If He Is Serving Round The Edge Of An Imaginary Building.

In Recent Years, Perhaps Encouraged By Competition From Mcdonald's, The British Hamburger Has Become A Credit To The Nation. At The Time Of Which I Speak, It Looked Like A Scorched Beer-coaster Or A Tenderized Disc Brake.

Prejudices Are Useless. Call Los Angeles Any Dirty Name You Like - Six Suburbs In Search Of A City, Paradise With A Lobotomy, Anything - But The Fact Remains That You Are Already Living In It Before You Get There

Perhaps I Should Have Pointed Out More Often That Without Her (mother's) Guidance And Example I Might Have Gone Straight From Short Pants To Long Bay Gaol, Which In Those Days Was Still In Use And Heavily Populated By Larcenous Young Men Who Had Chosen Their Parents Less Wisely.

Like A Volvo, Bjorn Borg Is Rugged, Has Good After-sales Service, And Is Very Dull.

A Luxury Liner Is Really Just A Bad Play Surrounded By Water.

Here Was My First Lesson On The Resolutely Maintained Untidiness And Ill-health Of The English Upper Orders. In Baggy Evening Dress And Old Before Their Time, They Displayed Gapped And Tangled Teeth In Loosely Open Mouths. Gently Shedding Dandruff, They Lurched Across The Lawn. When They Stood At The Bar They Looked Like Lee Trevino Putting.

A Decade Ago, Critics Suggested Biotech Crops Would Not Be Valuable In The Developing World. Now 90 Percent Of Farmers Who Benefit Are Resource-poor Farmers In Developing Countries. These Helped Alleviate 7.7 Million Subsistence Farmers In China, India, South Africa, The Philippines From Abject Poverty.

Developing Countries

In The Movies First Impressions Are Everything. Or, To Put It Less Drastically, In The Movies There Are No Later Impressions Without A First Impression, Because You Will Have Stopped Watching. Sometimes A Critic Persuades You To Give An Unpromising-looking Movie A Chance, But The Movie Had Better Convey The Impression Pretty Quickly That The Critic Might Be Right.

First Impression

People Should Be Stopped From Writing Poetry. There's Far Too Much Of It. And If They're Any Good, They'll Go Ahead Anyways.

You Should Never Trust Anyone Who Listens To Mahler Before They're Forty.

Humphrey Searle Writes Music That Sounds Like The Theme From 'star Wars' Played Backwards Through A Washing Machine.

Spending All My Remaining Money On A Ticket To Florence Was Rendered Needlessly Complicated By The Fact That None Of The Ticket-sellers Had Ever Heard Of The Place. At Last Their Supervisor Showed Up And Set Them Straight By Informing Them That The City They Had Always Referred To As 'firenze' Was In Reality Called Florence.

Bjorn Borg Looks Like A Hunchbacked, Jut-bottomed Version Of Lizabeth Scott, Impersonating A Bearded Apache Princess.

Visitors Who Come From The Soviet Union And Tell You How Marvelous It Is To Be Able To Look At Public Buildings Without Advertisements Stuck All Over Them Are Just Telling You That They Can't Decipher The Cyrillic Alphabet.

Among Artists Without Talent Marxism Will Always Be Popular, Since It Enables Them To Blame Society For The Fact That Nobody Wants To Hear What They Have To Say.

Young Men Especially - I Don't Know If Young Women Feel Much The Same - But Young Men Think They Are Immortal, Automatically. They Have No Idea Of Time Because They Have So Much Energy And I Was Like That.

I Taught Myself Russian, Which Was Very, Very Useful, Especially For Poetry And In Fact If You Can't Read Pushkin In Russian, You're Really Missing Something.

Mocking Hugh Hefner Is Easy To Do, And In My Mind Should Be Made Easier.

Almost 70 Years Have Gone By, And I've Still Got That Feeling When I Write... Writing, For Me, Is Still It. It Has Always Been The Basis Of Everything I Do. I'm A Writer Who Performs, Not A Performer Who Writes. I Love The Act Of Writing. It's Still A Thrill For Me.

I've Only Got A Fraction Of The Energy I Once Had, But I Think I Probably Use It Better.

It Is A Good Rule In Life To Be Wary Of The Company Of People Who Think Of Themselves In The Third Person, No Matter How Well Justified They Might Seem To Be In Doing So.

It's A Big Thing To Call Yourself A Poet. All I Can Say Is That I Have Always Written Poems. I Don't Think I'm Interested In Any Discussion About Whether I'm A Good Poet, A Bad Poet Or A Great Poet. But I Am Sure, I Want To Write Great Poems. I Think Every Poet Should Want That.

If We Want A Book To Do More Than What It Does, That's A Condemnation. If We Want It To Do More Of What It Does, That's An Endorsement.

Every Sentence He Manages To Utter Scatters Its Component Parts Like Pond Water From A Verb Chasing Its Own Tail.

A Sense Of Humour Is Common Sense Dancing.

You Can't Be Young Always. The Day Will Come When Everything Will Fall Apart.

I've Got Life For A Subject Because As Life Starts To Drain Away, You Start Seeing Very Clearly What Life Is, For The First Time.

Even In Moments Of Tranquility, Murray Walker Sounds Like A Man Whose Trousers Are On Fire.

In The Bob Hope Golf Classic (lwt) The Participation Of President Gerald Ford Was More Than Enough To Remind You That The Nuclear Button Was At One Stage At The Disposal Of A Man Who Might Have Either Pressed It By Mistake Or Else Pressed It Deliberately In Order To Obtain Room Service.

In London There Was No Home Cooking Worthy Of The Name. When You Were In Funds You Ate Out. But Only The People Whose Faces Appeared In Such Publications As Town And Queen Could Afford To Eat In Restaurants Serving Food Which Would Leave Them Looking And Feeling Better Instead Of Worse.

On The Correctly Formed Pubescent Girl, A Speedo Looked Wonderful. When It Was Wet, It Was An Incitement To Riot.

I Love Reading About The Sea. I Love Reading About It A Lot More Than Actually Being On The Sea, When You Think About It.

I Actually Didn't Like That Feeling Of Being Out Of Touch Because What I Do Depends On Being In Touch. But It's Fun To Talk About. That's One Of The Real Dangers Of Drugs: They're Too Much Fun To Talk About.

The Repeat Run Of Fawlty Towers (bbc2) Drew Bigger Audiences Than Ever And Deservedly So. Statistical Surveys Reveal That Only The Television Critic Of The Spectator Is Incapable Of Seeing The Joke, Which Is That Basil Fawlty Has The Wrong Temperament To Be A Hotel Proprietor, Just As Some Other People Have The Wrong Temperament To Be Television Critics.

It's My Mission To Tell The Australians From Abroad In My Work That Australia Is A Wonderful Place.

What Is Camille Paglia Doing, Writing That An Actress As Gifted As Anne Heche Has The Mental Depth Of A Pancake? How Many Pancake Brains Could Do What Heche Did With David Mamet's Dialogue In Wag The Dog? No Doubt Heche Has Been Stuck With A Few Bad Gigs, But Paglia, Of All People, Must Be Well Aware That Being An Actress Is Not The Same Safe Ride As Being The Tenured University Professor Of Humanities And Media Studies At The University Of The Arts In Philadelphia.

Dinner Was Meat - Not Hunks Of Meat, As In Australia, But Pathetic Scraps Of Meat, As In Britain - Which The Girls Upstairs Transformed Into Edible Dishes By Heating It In Secret Ways And Adding Bits Of Stuff To It.

I Work On The Assumption, Or Let It Be The Fear, That The Reader Will Stop Reading If I Stop Being Interesting.

A Lot Of My Poems Are About How Ill I Am And How I Probably Won't Live Beyond Next Week. I Publish A Poem And Everyone Says 'cluck Cluck, How Wonderful, How Brave', But Then Embarrassingly I'm Still Here! You See The Problem?

They Had A... Dog Called Bluey. A Know Psychopath, Bluey Would Attack Himself If Nothing Else Was Available.

In Between The Queen And The First Lady, Nancy Reagan, Sat Tony Richardson, Looking Very Calm. Later On It Emerged That This Was Because, Having Not Been Apprised Of The Placement Until He Was About To Sit Down, He Had Died Of Fright. To Have Expired Was To Be Fortunate.

Beyoncé And Pathos Are Strangers. Amy Winehouse And Pathos Are Flatmates, And You Should See The Kitchen.

The Key To Effective Teaching Is To Remember How You Learned.

The First Language That I Learned Was Italian In Italy In The Early And Middle-'60s And I Had To Do That To Keep Up With The Young Men Who Were Courting My Wife.

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