Clifton Fadiman famous quotes

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

#Wine #Soul #Body

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

#Wine #Bottles #Lovers

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

#Country #Travel #People

Wine is poetry in a bottle.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Wine #Bottles

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

#Dream #Sleep #Insomnia

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

#Real #Real Friends #Numbers

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Memories #Good Memories #Forget

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

#Wine #Rivers #Mouths

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.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Book #Classic

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

#Book #Consciousness #Film

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

#Running #Book #Home

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

#Morning #Book #Generations

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

#Drinking #Wine #Hobbies

Name me any liquid except our own blood that flows more intimately and incessantly through the labyrinth of symbols we have conceived to make our status as human beings, from the rudest peasant festival to the mystery of the Eucharist. To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Wine #Blood #Names

Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Art #Entertainment #Fiction

Wine is a civilizing agent.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Wine #Agents

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

#Birthday #Wall #Years

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

#Writing #Two #Giving

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

#Thinking #Interesting #Helpful

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Adjectives #Speech #Bananas

Reading to small children is a specialty.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Children #Reading #Specialty

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

#Book #Dark #Ideas

To feel at home, stay at home.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Home #Feels

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

#Witty #Rabbits #Drs

As between mileage and experience choose experience.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Experience

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

#Funny Inspirational #Sense Of Humor #Ability

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

#Writing #Mind #Flesh

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

#Father #Taken #Son

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

#Thinking #Guarantees #May

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.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Football #Wine #Hysteria

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

#Balance #Littles #Journalism

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

#Funny Life #Men #Envelopes

Liquor is not a necessity. It is a means of momentarily sidestepping necessity.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Mean #Liquor

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

#Men #Culinary #Palate

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

#Writing #Choices #Poor

Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Gertrude #Things Happen

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

#Sarcastic #Mistake #Mind

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

#Children #Keys #Imagination

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

#Eye #Men #Add

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

#Grandmother #Kind #Poet

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

#Book #Character #Reality

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

#School #Men #Trying

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.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Dull #May #Milk

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

#Order #Recollection

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

#Questions And Answers #Sculpture #Use

Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.
-- Clifton Fadiman

#Cheesy #Milk #Cheese