Clifton Fadiman Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

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

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

Wine is poetry in a bottle.

We are all citizens of history.

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

Cheese is milk’s leap toward immortality.

As between mileage and experience choose experience.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Cheese is milk’s leap towards immortality.

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

Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.

If you want to feel at home, stay home.

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.

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

To feel at home, stay at home.

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