Clifton Fadiman Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

[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.

A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.

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

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

Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.

We are all citizens of history.

As between mileage and experience choose experience.

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.

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

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.

Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.

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

If you want to feel at home, stay home.

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.

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.

Being a child is in itself a profession.

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.

The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.

Wine is poetry in a bottle.

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

Reading is not an operation performed on something inert but a relationship entered into with another vital being.

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.

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.

Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly

Wine is a civilizing agent.

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.

The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.

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.

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

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

Reading to small children is a specialty.

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.

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.

To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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