Clifton Fadiman Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

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

Clifton Fadiman
Miss Stein was a past master in making nothing happen very slowly.

Clifton Fadiman
Both the aphorism and the poem channel man's wild impulse to escape the systems another part of him has so carefully constructed.

Clifton Fadiman
An ideologue may be defined as a mad intellectual. He is not interested in ideas, but—almost the exact contrary—in one idea.

Clifton Fadiman
It would seem that in youth we sow our wild oats, in old age our tame anedcotes.

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

Clifton Fadiman
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.

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

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

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

Clifton Fadiman
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
Not to cover the subject, but to uncover and isolate a part of it … is the aim of the aphorist

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

Clifton Fadiman
An aphorism can contain only as much wisdom as overstatement will permit.

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

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

Clifton Fadiman
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.

Clifton Fadiman
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
The kind of poetry to avoid is 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
A bottle of wine begs to be shared. I have never met a miserly wine lover.

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

Clifton Fadiman