I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
Clive JamesRead
Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write... Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me.
Interpretation
This quote expresses a deep passion for writing and the joy it brings to the author.
Clive James reflects on his enduring love for writing, emphasizing that it has been a fundamental aspect of his life for nearly seven decades. He distinguishes himself as a writer first and foremost, whose performances stem from his writing, underscoring the thrill and satisfaction he derives from the craft of writing itself.
In practice
In a literary workshop to inspire budding authors.
I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
Murray sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves.
Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything - but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there
Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was.
One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.
I don't know if I believe in art. I certainly believe in light.
I bet you never heard of a playa with no game, Told the truth to get what I want, but shot it with no shame. Take this music dead serious while others entertain. I see they makin' they paper so I guess I can't complain...or can I? I feel they disrespectin' the whole thang. Them hooks like sellin' dope to black folks, And I choke when the food they serve ain't tastin' right, My stomach can't digest it even when I bless it.
Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.
Being a writer is part of a noble tradition, as is being a musician – the last egalitarian and open associations. No matter what happens in terms of fame and fortune, dedication to writing is a marching-step forward from where you were before, when you didn’t care about reaching out to the world, when you weren’t hoping to contribute, when you were just standing there doing some job into which you had fallen.
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