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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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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
Source
Inverted
Thought
Originality
May
Guarantees
Think
Whereas
Thinking
Prefer
Absence
Forgotten
Merely
Commas
More quotes by 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 at their best, wrote at their worst.
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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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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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As between mileage and experience choose experience.
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Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.
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My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat
Clifton Fadiman
We are all citizens of history.
Clifton Fadiman
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.
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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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There are two kinds of writers the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
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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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Wine is a civilizing agent.
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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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One's first book, kiss, home run is always the best.
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The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
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For most men, life is a search for the proper Manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
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The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
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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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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
The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.
Clifton Fadiman
