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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
Feeling
Ability
Residing
Rather
Absurdity
Understand
Joke
Comes
Surely
Sense
Jokes
Feelings
Oneself
Humor
More quotes by 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 adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
Clifton Fadiman
I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.
Clifton Fadiman
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.
Clifton Fadiman
Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.
Clifton Fadiman
Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
Clifton Fadiman
Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.
Clifton Fadiman
Being a child is in itself a profession.
Clifton Fadiman
As between mileage and experience choose experience.
Clifton Fadiman
For most men, life is a search for the proper Manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
Clifton Fadiman
My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat
Clifton Fadiman
A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
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
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
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.
Clifton Fadiman
Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
Clifton Fadiman
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
Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.
Clifton Fadiman
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
The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
Clifton Fadiman
