Best 132 quotes of Clive James on MyQuotes

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.

A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.

All honest labor becomes easy; it only becomes hard when done with unwillingness.

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.

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.

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.

A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.

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?

A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.

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.

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.

As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks

A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn't

A sense of humour is common sense dancing.

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.

A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.

Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.

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.

Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.

Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.

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.

Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn't deliver pizza.

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.

Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.

Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.

Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.

Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.

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.

Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.

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.

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.

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.

Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!

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.