Clifton Fadiman
A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.Collection: Good
When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.Collection: Travel
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself.Collection: Humor
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.Collection: Friendship
Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something.Collection: Experience
For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.Collection: Men
Cheese is milk's leap toward immortality.
The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover.
Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
As between mileage and experience choose experience.
To feel at home, stay at home.
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.
He has made a profession out of a business and an art out of a profession.
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.
To take wine into our mouths 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.
There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation.
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.
The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.
Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.
If food is the body of good living, wine is its soul.Collection: Wine
Wine is poetry in a bottle.Collection: Wine
Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.Collection: Book
The man who attracts luck carries with him the magnet of preparation.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Art
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.Collection: Funny Inspirational
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.Collection: Food
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.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Children
To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.Collection: Wine
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.Collection: Book
If you want to feel at home, stay home.Collection: Home
We are all citizens of history.Collection: History
Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.Collection: Cheesy
[Books] will visit you at your convenience, whether you are lonesome or not, on rainy days or fair. They propose themselves as either transient acquaintances or permanent friends. They will stay as long as you like, departing or returning as you wish. Their friendship entails no obligation. Best of all, and not always true of our merely human friends, they have Cleopatra's infinite variety.Collection: Book
A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.Collection: Food
Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.Collection: Funny
My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eatCollection: Order
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.Collection: Book
I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversationCollection: Questions And Answers
Being a child is in itself a profession.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Idols
Reading is not an operation performed on something inert but a relationship entered into with another vital being.Collection: Reading
The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.Collection: Reason
One's first book, kiss, home run is always the best.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Birthday