87 Quotes by Clifton Fadiman

Reading to small children is a specialty.

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.

Don't be afraid of poetry.

When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

The tantrums of cloth-headed celluloid idols are deemed fit for grown-up conversation, while silence settles over such a truly important matter as food.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

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.

Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book [ Absalom, Absalom!] except that it seem to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent… this is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks. The characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare.

A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover