Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts Quotes.

1. "Friedell caught the essential truth about people prone to catch-all theories: they aren’t in search of the truth, they’re in search of themselves."
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

2. "When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in."
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

3. "The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight."
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

4. "When I first read The Rebel, this splendid line came leaping from the page like a dolphin from a wave. I memorized it instantly, and from then on Camus was my man. I wanted to write like that, in a prose that sang like poetry. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to wear a Bogart-style trench coat with the collar turned up, have an untipped Gauloise dangling from my lower lip, and die romantically in a car crash. At the time, the crash had only just happened. The wheels of the wrecked Facel Vega were practically still spinning, and at Sydney University I knew exiled French students, spiritually scarred by service in Indochina, who had met Camus in Paris: one of them claimed to have shared a girl with him. Later on, in London, I was able to arrange the trench coat and the Gauloise, although I decided to forgo the car crash until a more propitious moment. Much later, long after having realized that smoking French cigarettes was just an expensive way of inhaling nationalized industrial waste, I learned from Olivier Todd's excellent biography of Camus that the trench coat had been a gift from Arthur Koestler's wife and that the Bogart connection had been, as the academics say, no accident. Camus had wanted to look like Bogart, and Mrs. Koestler knew where to get the kit. Camus was a bit of an actor--he though, in fact, that he was a lot of an actor, although his histrionic talent was the weakest item of his theatrical equipment--and, being a bit of an actor, he was preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are. But under the posturing agonies about authenticity there was something better than authentic: there was something genuine. He was genuinely poetic. Being that, he could apply two tests simultaneously to his own language: the test of expressiveness, and the test of truth to life. To put it another way, he couldn't not apply them."
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

5. "As the late Edward W Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Center, ‘Western humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism.’ I agree with that. The question is how to get it, and my own view is that it can’t be had unless we raise our demands on ourselves a long way beyond decorating our lives with enough cultivation to make the pursuit of ambition look civilized."
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

6. "bohemian’s ability not to worry about money always starts with your money rather than his.)"
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

7. "And above all, I am not interested enough in politics to let them encumber my last days. —DRIEU LA ROCHELLE,"
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

8. "Luxury is a necessity that starts where necessity stops. —COCO CHANEL (ATTRIB.):"
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

9. "But caveat lector: life is waiting, and to read about someone who writes about life is getting far from it. Reading Schopenhauer when he tells you to watch out for reading too many books is already getting far from it, and at this moment you are reading someone who is telling you about how Schopenhauer said that you should not let reading come between you and life. In philosophy, the infinite regress is a sign that someone has made a mistake in logic. In ordinary life, it is a sign that someone is hiding from reality."
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

10. "if you are vulnerable economically, you are vulnerable all along the line."
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts