Clive James

“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.”

“When I first read The Rebel, this splendid line came leaping from the page like a dolphin from a wave. I memorized it instantly, and from then on Camus was my man. I wanted to write like that, in a prose that sang like poetry. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to wear a Bogart-style trench coat with the collar turned up, have an untipped Gauloise dangling from my lower lip, and die romantically in a car crash. At the time, the crash had only just happened. The wheels of the wrecked Facel Vega were practically still spinning, and at Sydney University I knew exiled French students, spiritually scarred by service in Indochina, who had met Camus in Paris: one of them claimed to have shared a girl with him. Later on, in London, I was able to arrange the trench coat and the Gauloise, although I decided to forgo the car crash until a more propitious moment. Much later, long after having realized that smoking French cigarettes was just an expensive way of inhaling nationalized industrial waste, I learned from Olivier Todd's excellent biography of Camus that the trench coat had been a gift from Arthur Koestler's wife and that the Bogart connection had been, as the academics say, no accident. Camus had wanted to look like Bogart, and Mrs. Koestler knew where to get the kit. Camus was a bit of an actor--he though, in fact, that he was a lot of an actor, although his histrionic talent was the weakest item of his theatrical equipment--and, being a bit of an actor, he was preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are. But under the posturing agonies about authenticity there was something better than authentic: there was something genuine. He was genuinely poetic. Being that, he could apply two tests simultaneously to his own language: the test of expressiveness, and the test of truth to life. To put it another way, he couldn't not apply them.”

“Thick skin is not the thing to have if you are an artist of any kind. It’s got to be bulletproof in the sense that it lets the bullet in, and it travels through, and it comes out the other side. I’ve had everything hurled at me, especially in Australia. Australia is where the tough journalists are.”

“Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.”

“Some people are different, and so are the rest of us.”

“All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.”

“Art is the outward integration inspired by the artist's inner disintegration.”

“Friedell caught the essential truth about people prone to catch-all theories: they aren’t in search of the truth, they’re in search of themselves.”

“Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.”

“Devotees who say that À la recherche du temps perdu reminds them of a cathedral should be asked which cathedral they mean. It reminds me of a sandcastle that the tide reached before its obsessed constructor could finish it; but he knew that would happen, or else why build it on a beach?”

“When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.”

“There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.”

“A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”

“Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”

“The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.”

“She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.”

“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”