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

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
Writers
Ones
Two
Give
Giving
Great
Bedtime
Writing
Truths
Kind
Kinds

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Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly
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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.
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To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.
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The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As between mileage and experience choose experience.
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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.
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Wine is poetry in a bottle.
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One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.
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A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.
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I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
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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.
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I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation
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Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
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The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
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Being a child is in itself a profession.
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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.
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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