Clifton Fadiman Quotes

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.

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.

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.

As between mileage and experience choose experience.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

We are all citizens of history.

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

Wine is a civilizing agent.

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

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

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.

The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.

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.

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

[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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Poetry is not an esoteric art cultivated by dreamy young men in open collars and with wispy beards. Its finest masters have always been men and women of outstanding energy and great, though by no means common, sense. Poetry is the most economical way of saying certain things that cannot be said in any other way. At its most intense it expresses better than other forms of literature whatever is left of us when we are not involved in instinct-following, surviving, competing, or problem-solving. Its major property is not, as some suppose, beauty. It is power. It is the most powerful form of communication. It does the most work per syllable, operating on a vast field - that of our emotions. It gains its efficiency from the use of certain levers - rhythm, music, rhyme, metaphor, and many more - for which other forms of communication are less well adapted. Some poetry, especially modern poetry, is difficult. But just as our ears have accustomed themselves to difficult music, so our understanding, if we are willing to make an effort, can accustom itself to the most condensed and superficially strange verse. At one time poetry was as democratic an art as the novel is nowadays. It can be so again, if we are willing to make it so.

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

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.

[Wine is] poetry in a bottle.

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.

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.

Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.