Clifton Fadiman Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wine is poetry in a bottle.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.

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

We are all citizens of history.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Wine is a civilizing agent.

As between mileage and experience choose experience.

Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly

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

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

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

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.

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

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

If you want to feel at home, stay home.

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

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

Reading to small children is a specialty.

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.

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.

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.

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

Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.

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.

The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.

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

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

There are two kinds of writers - the great ones who can give you truths and the lesser ones who can only give you themselves.

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