Clive James Quotes

After being murdered at Stalin's orders, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), lived on for decades as the unassailable hero of aesthetically minded progressives who wished to persuade themselves that there could be a vegetarian version of communism.

In Sartre's style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.

A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.

If you can't have a revolution without Jacobinism, then it becomes a matter of how to have reform without revolution. Anyone who "accepts the necessity of Jacobinism" wants to try his hand at it. When François Furet hinted at this conclusion in his truly revolutionary book on the French Revolution, he found himself immediately tagged by the left as a diehard spokesman of the reactionary right. It was assumed that if he was against the Terror, he was against the people. His contention that the Terror had been against the people was not accepted.

Pedants and snobs are fond of declaring that only accomplished French speakers can catch Proust's tone. That might be so, but the tone is only one of the things to be caught.

The flowers bloomed, the schools of thought contended, and Mao's executioners went to work. The slogan had the same function as the Constitution of the Soviet Union, which Aleksandr Zinoviev tellingly defined as a document published in order to find out who agreed with it, so that they could be dealt with.

One of [Mann's] many reasons for hating the Third Reich was that it forced him to be a better man than he really was.

A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say.

Few artists were ever fully well, so it is no great trick to prove them ill. There are commentators who can't get interested in Caravaggio until they find out he killed someone. They are only one step from believing that every killer is Caravaggio.

Attempting to define the sensationalism of the press, Malcolm Muggeridge came up with the slogan 'Give us this day our daily story.' A doomed effort, because all it did was remind the reader that the King James Version of the Lord's Prayer was better written than an article by Muggeridge.

Since the Nazi era need never have happened, to say that he prophesised it is actually a belittlement of his creative achievement, and only one step up from saying that he caused the whole thing. But nobody could now read The Trial without thinking of the Soviet show trials, or the short works Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony without thinking of the death camps.

Back in the late 1950s, on the sleeve of the Beyond the Fringe record album, Jonathan Miller made a dark joke about his worst fear: being tortured for information that he did not possess. The assumption behind the joke was that if he had something to reveal, the agony would stop. He was looking back to a world of polite British fiction, not to a world of brute European fact. In the Nazi and Soviet cellars and camps, people were regularly tortured for information they did not possess: i.e. they were tortured just for the hell of it.

The question isn't about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Beethoven. The question is about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Mozart.

Taste was his world. Rilke behaved as if art were taste elevated to the highest possible degree. The armigerous chatelaines who played hostess were happy to believe it, since the idea made them artists too.

Unreliable Memoirs was just too hard to classify: most of the first wave of American reviewers had convicted it of trying to be truthful and fanciful at the same time. Since I had clearly had no other aim in mind, I read these indictments with sad bewilderment. The most powerful reviewer, in The New York Review of Books, had seized on my incidental remark 'Rilke was a prick' in order to instruct me that Rilke was, on the contrary, an important German poet.