Best 46 quotes of Clifton Fadiman on MyQuotes

A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover.

A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover. The social emotions it generates are equidistant from the philatelist's solitary gloating and the football fan's gregarious hysteria.

A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.

Being a child is in itself a profession.

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.

[Books] will visit you at your convenience, whether you are lonesome or not, on rainy days or fair. They propose themselves as either transient acquaintances or permanent friends. They will stay as long as you like, departing or returning as you wish. Their friendship entails no obligation. Best of all, and not always true of our merely human friends, they have Cleopatra's infinite variety.

By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one

Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.

Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something.

For most men, life is a search for the proper Manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.

Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly

If food is the body of good living, wine is its soul.

I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.

If you want to feel at home, stay home.

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.

I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.

My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat

My son is 7 years old. I am 54. It has taken me a great many years to reach that age. I am more respected in the community, I am stronger, I am more intelligent and I think I am better than he is. I don't want to be a pal, I want to be a father.

Name me any liquid — except our own blood — that flows more intimately and incessantly through the labyrinth of symbols we have conceived to mark our status as human beings, from the rudest peasant festival to the mystery of the Eucharist.

One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.

One's first book, kiss, home run is always the best.

Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.

Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book [ Absalom, Absalom!] except that it seem to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent… this is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks. The characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare.

Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

The drinking of wine seems to me to have a moral edge over many pleasures and hobbies in that it promotes love of one's neighbor.

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

The man who attracts luck carries with him the magnet of preparation.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning's books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.

The tantrums of cloth-headed celluloid idols are deemed fit for grown-up conversation, while silence settles over such a truly important matter as food.

To divide one's life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.

To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.

We are all citizens of history.

We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.

What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

Don't be afraid of poetry.

Poetry is not an esoteric art cultivated by dreamy young men in open collars and with wispy beards. Its finest masters have always been men and women of outstanding energy and great, though by no means common, sense. Poetry is the most economical way of saying certain things that cannot be said in any other way. At its most intense it expresses better than other forms of literature whatever is left of us when we are not involved in instinct-following, surviving, competing, or problem-solving. Its major property is not, as some suppose, beauty. It is power. It is the most powerful form of communication. It does the most work per syllable, operating on a vast field—that of our emotions. It gains its efficiency from the use of certain levers—rhythm, music, rhyme, metaphor, and many more—for which other forms of communication are less well adapted. Some poetry, especially modern poetry, is difficult. But just as our ears have accustomed themselves to difficult music, so our understanding, if we are willing to make an effort, can accustom itself to the most condensed and superficially strange verse. At one time poetry was as democratic an art as the novel is nowadays. It can be so again, if we are willing to make it so.

When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.