CLIVE JAMES

Whoever called snooker 'chess with balls' was rude, but right.

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

It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.

The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.

It's my mission to tell the Australians from abroad in my work that Australia is a wonderful place.

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

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.

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.

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

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.

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

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.