Quote

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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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
Understand
Joke
Comes
Surely
Sense
Jokes
Feelings
Oneself
Humor
Feeling
Ability
Residing
Rather
Absurdity

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As between mileage and experience choose experience.
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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.
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Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly
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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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Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
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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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The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
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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.
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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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One's first book, kiss, home run is always the best.
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Wine is a civilizing agent.
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If you want to feel at home, stay home.
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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.
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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.
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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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We are all citizens of 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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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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My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat
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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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