Quotes by Clifton Fadiman

“Don't be afraid of poetry.”

“Reading to small children is a specialty.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didnt know you knew.”

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

“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.”

“To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.”

“Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something.”

“For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.”

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

“One's first book kiss home run is always the best.”

“Cheese - milk's leap toward immortality.”

“One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.”

“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 adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.”

“There are two kinds of writers - the great ones who can give you truths and the lesser ones who can only give you themselves.”

“A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself.”

“One's first book kiss home run is always the best.”