Clifton Fadiman Quotes - Page 2

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

The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Wine is a civilizing agent.

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.

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.

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

As between mileage and experience choose experience.

Reading to small children is a specialty.