Clifton fadiman quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.

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

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

Being a child is in itself a profession.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

[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.

If you want to feel at home, stay home.

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.

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.

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

We are all citizens of history.

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.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

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

Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.

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

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.

As between mileage and experience choose experience.

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.

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

Wine is poetry in a bottle.

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.

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

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.

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.

Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly

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

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

Wine is a civilizing agent.

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

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.

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.

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