Unreliable Memoirs Quotes

“Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.”
― Clive James, Unreliable Memoirs

“Funny Debates at both Cambridge and Oxford eventually helped to convince me that the only place to be amusing is in a serious context.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“In those days you matched a block of balsa against a rudimentary diagram and got going with a razor blade, which sliced your thumb as readily as it carved the balsa. If the result was recognizable as an aeroplane, you were an expert. If your thumb was recognizable as a thumb, you were a genius.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“One parent is enough to spoil you but discipline takes two. I got too much of what I wanted and not enough of what I needed.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivation. Deprived I never felt.”
― Clive James, Unreliable Memoirs: Unrealiable Memoirs Book 1

“Noël Coward’s comment about the secret of success being the capacity to survive failure.”
― Clive James, Unreliable Memoirs: Unrealiable Memoirs Book 1

“I had been excited by a chapter dealing with torture chambers. I still find it disturbing that sex and cruelty should be connected somewhere in my instincts. But the human personality is a drama, not a monologue; sad tricks of the mind can be offset by sound feelings in the heart; and the facts say that I have always been revolted by the very idea of deliberately causing pain.”
― Clive James, Unreliable Memoirs

“Out of nowhere, our problem was solved. We had a stringer in New York whose life was spent collecting awful things for us off the cable channels: biker astrologists, transvestite psychics, body-building sexologists, stuff like that. He lived in a cold-water flat somewhere on the Upper West Side dodging cockroaches the size of rats while he survived on pizza. One night he was watching a cable channel unbelievably called Channel 69. Exercising their rights under the First Amendment, anyone at all could pay ten dollars and go on Channel 69 to do a number, because in America everyone is entitled to self-expression: it’s in the Constitution. Our stringer was halfway though a five-cheese pizza with extra cheese when he was suddenly face to face with an Hispanic woman in a green feather boa singing the Lionel Ritchie hit ‘Hello’ while she pounded away at a Yamaha portable piano. He had never seen anything like her in his life and for a while he thought there might be something wrong with the pizza, but when he recovered his mind he sent me a video by courier. The video had the artist’s name handwritten on the label. It was Margarita Pracatan.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“When the cover was lifted to reveal nothing but a heaped plate of pineapple chunks, however, there were people in the audience who could take no more.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“Raised in the hot sun, my idea of romance was to feel cold. North was a thrilling word to me. Balzac said that a novel should send the reader into another country. My dreams were like that. They still are.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“I forgave them, having surmised – correctly, as it turned out – that America was merely first in achieving a level of average income so high that even the mentally underprivileged were able to travel, and that shortly all the other industrialised countries would start exporting idiots too.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“In the Italian galleries even the guides regularly fingered the paint surface.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“The pasta was always al dente, an expression which could be pressed into service as the name of a ferocious gangster.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“matched pair of Purdey shot-guns, one of which had not been fired,”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“row of damaged books which Davenport had failed to return to the London Library.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“Cambridge will probably never get round to formally approving homosexuality, but the type of homosexual involved perhaps prefers a blind eye”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“I had landed in the lap of the only kind of luxury I have ever cared about – a wealth of opportunity.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“We made our first private-life contact not at Harmondsworth or in the Kombibus but at the London Library in St James’s Square.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“Asking you to play someone you’re not is like asking King Kong to play the Moonlight Sonata.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“Some people are different from the rest of us, and so are the rest of us.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“He knew where to drop the needle – an especially important qualification in the matter of Wagner, with whom it is an invariable rule that the most immediately accessible bits are never at the edge of the disc.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“in those days I construed absence of explicit opposition as a whole-hearted endorsement.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“George Russell had responded to yet another request for a reference, sending, by return air-letter, an encomium which would have sat extravagantly on the shoulders of Pico della Mirandola.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“sat transfixed by the rhythm of that voice – the strong view lightly stated. It wasn’t words plus pictures.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“Dining out meant shepherd’s pie and bitter at the Anchor, Bankside. The Anchor was a little sooty brick Georgian pub on the Embankment.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“I still get so impatient with the whole time-consuming business of covering up exposed skin that I will buy the first thing that catches my eye, and that when it comes to shoes the first thing that catches your eye is the last thing you should ever put on your feet.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“Then I lifted my arms to adjust the mirror, and discovered that I couldn’t see. The shoulders of the jacket had immediately risen to engulf my head. When I put my arms back down, vision returned. Perhaps I had just moved too suddenly. Tentatively I lifted my right arm. The right shoulder of the jacket went up past my ear. Ditto for the left side. Even more slowly I lifted both arms. Blackout. There was no spare cloth in the armpits: the gussets, or whatever they were called, were missing.”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.”
― Clive James, Unreliable Memoirs: Unrealiable Memoirs Book 1

“and Cate Blanchett in the same kitchen, for a cup of tea and a chat. The post-war Australian expatriates were looked at with suspicion by their countrymen early on. Later, they got too much favour. My own view is that, of those among us who sailed away to England in the early 1960s, those who soon sailed back again did best. This especially applied to the theatre. In earlier times, a long and powerfully”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

“inspection of kit, dress and rifle”
― Clive James, The Complete Unreliable Memoirs