Top 51 Clifton Fadiman Quotes
#1. 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.
Clifton Fadiman
#2. 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.
Clifton Fadiman
#3. 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.
Clifton Fadiman
#4. 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.
Clifton Fadiman
#6. By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one.
Clifton Fadiman
#7. A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.
Clifton Fadiman
#9. Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
Clifton Fadiman
#10. A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover
Clifton Fadiman
#11. 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.
Clifton Fadiman
#12. One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.
Clifton Fadiman
#14. 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.
Clifton Fadiman
#16. Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.
Clifton Fadiman
#17. The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.
Clifton Fadiman
#18. He has made a profession out of a business and an art out of a profession.
Clifton Fadiman
#19. I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation.
Clifton Fadiman
#20. Reading is not an operation performed on something inert but a relationship entered into with another vital being.
Clifton Fadiman
#23. The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
Clifton Fadiman
#24. Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn't know you knew.
Clifton Fadiman
#25. Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
Clifton Fadiman
#26. A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself.
Clifton Fadiman
#27. There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
Clifton Fadiman
#29. 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.
Clifton Fadiman
#32. For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
Clifton Fadiman
#33. 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.
Clifton Fadiman
#34. Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.
Clifton Fadiman
#35. When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
Clifton Fadiman
#37. The man who attracts luck carries with him the magnet of preparation.
Clifton Fadiman
#38. Liquor is not a necessity. It is a means of momentarily sidestepping necessity.
Clifton Fadiman
#39. I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
Clifton Fadiman
#40. Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
Clifton Fadiman
#41. 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.
Clifton Fadiman
#42. Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye,
particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something.
Clifton Fadiman
#43. My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat.
Clifton Fadiman
#44. To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history
Clifton Fadiman
#46. One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.
Clifton Fadiman
#49. Dr. Seuss provided ingenious and uniquely witty solutions to the standing problem of the juvenile fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole.
Clifton Fadiman
#50. 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.
Clifton Fadiman
#51. I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.
Clifton Fadiman
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