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Clifton Fadiman

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Clifton Fadiman
Age: 95 †
Born: 1904
Born: May 15
Died: 1999
Died: June 20
Intellectual
Journalist
Literary Critic
Radio Personality
Television Presenter
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Clifton Paul Fadiman
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More quotes by Clifton Fadiman

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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
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I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation
Clifton Fadiman
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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
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Wine is a civilizing agent.
Clifton Fadiman
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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
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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
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The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
Clifton Fadiman
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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
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A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
Clifton Fadiman
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A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.
Clifton Fadiman
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Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
Clifton Fadiman
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Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.
Clifton Fadiman
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For most men, life is a search for the proper Manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
Clifton Fadiman
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One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.
Clifton Fadiman
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Wine is poetry in a bottle.
Clifton Fadiman
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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
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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
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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
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The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
Clifton Fadiman
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Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.
Clifton Fadiman