Clive James (Vivian Leopold James) Quotes
Herzen was closer to the truth when he said that every memory calls up a dozen others. The real miracle of Proust is the discipline with which he stemmed the flow. Everything is a Madeleine.
Quotes to Explore
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Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience.
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Whatever has happened to you in your past has no power over this present moment, because life is now.
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It happens that I'm heterosexual, but I don't care about that. I do care about protecting the rights of 10 percent of our population who are homosexual and who don't have the ability to protect their rights.
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When you actually fall in love, no one sees that other person the way that you do.
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If there is an authoritarian structure at St. Hill it has been brought into being by the government itself. St. Hill is trying to correct itself. It doesn't know what it's trying to correct because nobody has told it what to correct.
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Major success feels a bit like a coronation. Like I'd become a king. I was one of the most famous people in the world, loved and hated in equal measure. I couldn't see anything bad with it. It made me a happy person.
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I've spoken with friends who are rabbis and priests and we've agreed that most people have an emotional attachment to their faith, a desire to fulfill their spiritual longings, but they are not experts in understanding the history of their religion.
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I am more afraid of those who are terrified of the devil than I am of the devil himself.
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It took me just three months to pick up Hindi. I guess I'm a fast learner when it comes to languages.
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I was into basketball, but then once I found contact sports, it was over. I never played basketball again in my life.
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Judges can determine fair justice far better than any inane federal mandate.
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Bono told me how to dance in high heels and he also told me about U2's Glastonbury performance and how everything that could have possibly gone wrong went wrong, including him ripping his trousers on stage. I think he was lunging and his trousers ripped! He was telling me how he had to find a new way of performing that didn't involve moving.
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Maybe I'm the kind of athlete who absorbs the atmosphere instead of trying to block it out.
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Dying in the sanitary environment of a hospital is a relatively new concept. In the late 19th century, dying at a hospital was reserved for people who had nothing and no one. Given the choice, a person wanted to die at home in their bed, surrounded by friends and family.
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Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
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Sometimes when you're drunk you can see better.
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If there is no criticism, you become lazy. But it should be constructive, and it should be the truth. If it's biased and there's no truth in it, then I don't care about it. If it's true, it helps me grow.
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I remember having my father stand over me when I had driven over my own foot; one leg was out of the car and one leg was in the car. He looked at me and told me that I was a drunk and that he was ashamed to call me his son. That night, I stopped drinking and I never drank again; I was twenty four.
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On October 28th, 1887, I became the mother of a girl baby, the very image of its father, at least that is what he said, but who has the temper of its mother.
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Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.
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Looking back, I spent a lot of time sitting in pubs when I should have been perfecting my playwriting.
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I always had a larger view. I'm interested in real life - my family, my friends. I have tried never to define myself by my success, whatever that is. My happiness is way beyond roles and awards.
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Herzen was closer to the truth when he said that every memory calls up a dozen others. The real miracle of Proust is the discipline with which he stemmed the flow. Everything is a Madeleine.
