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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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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
Comes
Surely
Sense
Jokes
Feelings
Oneself
Humor
Feeling
Ability
Residing
Rather
Absurdity
Understand
Joke
More quotes by Clifton Fadiman
Wine is poetry in a bottle.
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Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
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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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Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.
Clifton Fadiman
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.
Clifton Fadiman
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
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
Being a child is in itself a profession.
Clifton Fadiman
I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.
Clifton Fadiman
The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
Clifton Fadiman
Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
Clifton Fadiman
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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Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.
Clifton Fadiman
The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.
Clifton Fadiman
A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
Clifton Fadiman
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
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
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
The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
Clifton Fadiman
I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
Clifton Fadiman
