Clive James Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• If we want a book to do more than what it does, that's a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that's an endorsement.

  Clive James

  Book, Want, Doe

  Clive James (2011). “The Revolt of the Pendulum: Essays 2005-2008”, p.60, Pan Macmillan

• Once, BBC television had echoed BBC radio in being a haven for standard English pronunciation. Then regional accents came in: a democratic plus. Then slipshod usage came in: an egalitarian minus. By now slovenly grammar is even more rife on the BBC channels than on ITV. In this regard a decline can be clearly charted... If the BBC, once the guardian of the English language, has now become its most implacable enemy, let us at least be grateful when the massacre is carried out with style.

  Clive James

  Grateful, Style, Enemy

• My wife spoke perfect Italian and she was very beautiful and very suave Italian men were crowding around her, talking all the time and if I was to even understand what was going on, I had to learn the language fast.

  Clive James

  Beautiful, Italian, Men

  "Summer Series: Clive James, in the face of death". Interview with Mark Colvin, www.abc.net.au. January 4, 2016.

• The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.

  Clive James

  Vocabulary, Way, Language

  "Summer Series: Clive James, in the face of death". Interview with Mark Colvin, www.abc.net.au. January 4, 2016.

• I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.

  Clive James

  Book, Order, Jail

  "Summer Series: Clive James, in the face of death". "PM" with Mark Colvin, www.abc.net.au. December 21, 2015.

• The first language that I learned was Italian in Italy in the early and middle-'60s and I had to do that to keep up with the young men who were courting my wife.

  Clive James

  Italian, Men, Wife

  "Summer Series: Clive James, in the face of death". "PM" with Mark Colvin, www.abc.net.au. January 4, 2016.

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