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21 " Then I lifted my arms to adjust the mirror, and discovered that I couldn’t see. The shoulders of the jacket had immediately risen to engulf my head. When I put my arms back down, vision returned. Perhaps I had just moved too suddenly. Tentatively I lifted my right arm. The right shoulder of the jacket went up past my ear. Ditto for the left side. Even more slowly I lifted both arms. Blackout. There was no spare cloth in the armpits: the gussets, or whatever they were called, were missing. "
― Clive James , Unreliable Memoirs
22 " I had landed in the lap of the only kind of luxury I have ever cared about – a wealth of opportunity. "
23 " Out of nowhere, our problem was solved. We had a stringer in New York whose life was spent collecting awful things for us off the cable channels: biker astrologists, transvestite psychics, body-building sexologists, stuff like that. He lived in a cold-water flat somewhere on the Upper West Side dodging cockroaches the size of rats while he survived on pizza. One night he was watching a cable channel unbelievably called Channel 69. Exercising their rights under the First Amendment, anyone at all could pay ten dollars and go on Channel 69 to do a number, because in America everyone is entitled to self-expression: it’s in the Constitution. Our stringer was halfway though a five-cheese pizza with extra cheese when he was suddenly face to face with an Hispanic woman in a green feather boa singing the Lionel Ritchie hit ‘Hello’ while she pounded away at a Yamaha portable piano. He had never seen anything like her in his life and for a while he thought there might be something wrong with the pizza, but when he recovered his mind he sent me a video by courier. The video had the artist’s name handwritten on the label. It was Margarita Pracatan. "
24 " I still get so impatient with the whole time-consuming business of covering up exposed skin that I will buy the first thing that catches my eye, and that when it comes to shoes the first thing that catches your eye is the last thing you should ever put on your feet. "
25 " Noël Coward’s comment about the secret of success being the capacity to survive failure. "
26 " He knew where to drop the needle – an especially important qualification in the matter of Wagner, with whom it is an invariable rule that the most immediately accessible bits are never at the edge of the disc. "
27 " Some people are different from the rest of us, and so are the rest of us. "
28 " Asking you to play someone you’re not is like asking King Kong to play the Moonlight Sonata. "
29 " We made our first private-life contact not at Harmondsworth or in the Kombibus but at the London Library in St James’s Square. "