Clive James

Some highlights from Clive James’s recent fascinating Cultural Amnesia .

Speaking of the lack of adventure in today’s successful careers: “Could there be anything less astonishing than to work day and night on Wall Street to make the millions that will buy the Picasso that will hang on the wall of our Upper East Side apartment to help convince us and our guests that we are lucky to know each other? I have been in that apartment, and admired the PIcass, and envied the owner: I especially envied him his third wife, who had the same eyes as Picasso’s second mistress, although they were on different sides of her nose.”

On dinner with Jay Leno, who fired off one joke after another: “I did my best to come back at him, but it wasn’t a conversation: more like mouth-to-mouth assassination.”

On Wittgenstein: “His philosophical position was like a defensive aesthetic strategy by which a poet hopes to write poetry in which there is nothing that can be criticized for its looseness: every line a Maginot line.”