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…

— Clifton Fadiman

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

[Books] will visit you at your convenience, whether you are lonesome or not, on rainy days or fair. They propose themselves as…

— Clifton Fadiman

Name me any liquid except our own blood that flows more intimately and incessantly through the labyrinth of symbols we have conceived…

— Clifton Fadiman

Wine is a civilizing agent.

— Clifton Fadiman

When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you…

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

“Don't be afraid of poetry.”

— Clifton Fadiman

Being a child is in itself a profession.

— Clifton Fadiman

Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book [ Absalom, Absalom!] except that it seem to point to the…

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

To feel at home, stay at home.

— Clifton Fadiman

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets…

— Clifton Fadiman

We prefer to believe that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that…

— Clifton Fadiman

What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of…

— Clifton Fadiman

There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning's books. Books are not rolls, to be…

— Clifton Fadiman

To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our…

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

We are all citizens of history.

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Clifton Fadiman

A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap…

— Clifton Fadiman