Clifton Fadiman

“The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.”

“Don't be afraid of poetry.”

“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 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.”

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

“He has made a profession out of a business and an art out of a profession.”

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

“A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.”

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

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

“My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat.”

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

“I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation.”

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

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

“I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.”

“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.”

“Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.”

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

“Reading to small children is a specialty.”