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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
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
One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.
Clifton Fadiman
I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.
Clifton Fadiman
My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat
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
To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.
Clifton Fadiman
I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation
Clifton Fadiman
Being a child is in itself a profession.
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
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.
Clifton Fadiman
As between mileage and experience choose experience.
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
If you want to feel at home, stay home.
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.
Clifton Fadiman
The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.
Clifton Fadiman
For most men, life is a search for the proper Manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
Clifton Fadiman
Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
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
Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.
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
