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Quote by Clive James

“The secret for an artist is to make that a subject and not bang your head against the wall and give up. But to turn it into and treat the new subject matter, which is one's own vanishing.”

Quote by Clive James

Author

Clive James, born on October 7, 1939, is an Australian author, critic, and broadcaster. His works span poetry, fiction, essays, and literary criticism, known for their unique humor and insightful observations. more

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“I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.”

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“Young men especially - I don't know if young women feel much the same - but young men think they are immortal, automatically. They have no idea of time because they have so much energy and I was like that.”

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“I try to be specific. One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You'd like to write phrases that people can't forget as soon as they read them.”

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“This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.”

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“If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.”

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“People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.”

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“Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave.”

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“For me, listening to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky in particular, there's an emotional aspect - very different kinds of emotional aspects from those two composers, nonetheless, very strong emotional aspects from both of those composers.”

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“I had a couple of experiences as a kid with animals where I hurt them, kind of unintentionally, and when I saw that a human being can hurt an animal it really affected me. And my kids...they became animal rights activists.”

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“My dad was a Buddhist when I was young. So, at a point when I begging become Catholic he was saying "no" and imparting Buddhist precepts.”

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