Clive James Quotes

Most all of the writers I admired when I was in my teens and twenties died young. Fitzgerald lived the longest. He was 44. Dylan Thomas was 39. And then once you're approaching 40, you suddenly think, "Well, maybe I would like to live longer than Fitzgerald or Thomas."

I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already been set in motion.

I felt old when I was young and I feel younger now. Maybe that's a trick of my mind, but I'm springier and lighter.

I just don't think of age and time in respect of years. I have too much experience of people in their seventies who are vigorous and useful and people who are thirty-five who are in lousy physical shape and can't think straight. I don't think age has that much to do with it.

I'm at a weird spot because I look so young and I feel young, but I'm not young.

I know that people have their own opinions and they look at what the norm is for people. I look at age as just being a number. In my mind my age is still 28 and I think I have to remember how old I am.

Be young. Keep yourself young by having a good, sporty car like a Corvette. It keeps you on your toes. It keeps you young. It keeps you thinking young. It keeps you thinking modern and good things. Corvette is a modern, modern automobile.

You know, I don't feel fifty. I feel not a day over forty-nine. It's incredible. I'm bouncy, I feel bouncy.

We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death -- or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again -- may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose time-table, hour by hour, has been settled in advance.

The trouble is that you think you have time.

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over.

It's not the days that are old, it's you that's old.

Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.

When I was a little kid, if somebody said they were thirty-five, I'd say "Oooh, they're going to die soon". But as I get older it doesn't mean a thing. You mustn't ever give in. Never give in to thinking you're old, because you're never old. Your mind, and I tell you this and listen to me carefully, your mind is never, ever old, it's eternally young.

I was delighted to be able to do the movie ["Terminator: Genisys"] without getting exhausted or feeling old or tired or anything like this. I felt I was in great shape and I felt really young.

What do you think, I was born at 60?

I know that I am old, because even if I think I'm younger than everyone - but that's true - my way of hoping and continuing is that I am always in a younger position than the other one.

Our judgements about things vary according to the time left us to live -that we think is left us to live.

I think people would live a bit longer if they didn't know how old they were. Age puts restrictions on things.

The young think they are immortal, and are determined to prove otherwise.

The secret to the fountain of youth is to think youthful thoughts.

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one's talent, and one's inner happiness.

I'm just too busy living every day to really spend a lot of time thinking 'am I old?' I'm this age. I am in this moment and in this life.

Hip-hop is youthful. The youth determines which direction it's gonna go. I think your thoughts and your visions starts to change, and you start to pay attention to things, as far as the world goes, a little bit later on in life.

What I thought 41 would be at 26 is definitely not what I feel now. I still feel incredibly youthful on the inside, in my brain.