Clifton Fadiman Quotes

“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

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

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

— Clifton Fadiman

“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

“Reading to small children is a specialty.”

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history

— Clifton Fadiman

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

“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

“Don't be afraid of poetry.”

— Clifton Fadiman

“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

“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

“As for those who think they don't like to read, well, I know they're making a mistake, just as all of us do when we try to judge ourselves. Now is the time to give reading a chance, for if you don't get the habit when you're young you may never get it. And if you don't get it, you may grow up to be just as dull as most adults are.”

— Clifton Fadiman

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

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

“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.”

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

“Cheese is milk's leap toward immortality.”

— Clifton Fadiman

“A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.”

— Clifton Fadiman

“To feel at home, stay at home.”

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

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

“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

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

— Clifton Fadiman

“Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.”

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

“As between mileage and experience choose experience.”

— Clifton Fadiman

He has made a profession out of a business and an art out of a profession.

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

“We are all citizens of history.”

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

“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

“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

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

— Clifton Fadiman

“[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.”

— Clifton Fadiman

Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.

— Clifton Fadiman

“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

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.

— Clifton Fadiman

“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

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

— Clifton Fadiman

Liquor is not a necessity. It is a means of momentarily sidestepping necessity.

— Clifton Fadiman

“Being a child is in itself a profession.”

— Clifton Fadiman