Clifton Fadiman Quotes

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.

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

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

Dr. Seuss provided "ingenious and uniquely witty solutions to the standing problem of the juvenile fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole.

Reading to small children is a specialty.

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

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

Cheese - milk's leap toward immortality.

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.

[Wine is] poetry in a bottle.

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.

A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.

Don't be afraid of poetry.

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.

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

From a footnote: Writes Clifton Fadiman: "A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.

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.

insomnio es un glotón. Se alimenta de cualquier clase de pensamiento, incluso cuando piensas en no pensar. Clifton Fadiman, antiguo director de Simon & Schuster

Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give him a preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men.

As for those who think they don't like to read, well, I know they're making a mistake, just as all of us do when we try to judge ourselves. Now is the time to give reading a chance, for if you don't get the habit when you're young you may never get it. And if you don't get it, you may grow up to be just as dull as most adults are.

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.

An aphorism can contain only as much wisdom as overstatement will permit.

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.

The child cannot too early learn to be a good citizen? I think this is questionable: citizenship is an adult affair. Let school and home teach the child to respect the laws and institutions of his country. For the time being that should suffice. To use the juvenile novel or biography to turn the child into an internationalist or an advocate of racial tolerance may be high-minded, but I would suggest that the child first be allowed to turn into a boy or girl. Pious Little Rollo is dead; the Good Little Citizen is replacing him. The moralistic literature of the last century tried to produce small paragons of virtue. How about our urge to manufacture small paragons of social consciousness?

We all die uneducated. But at least we will not feel quite so lost, so bewildered. We will have disenthralled ourselves from the merely contemporary. We will understand something—not much, but something—of our position in space and time.

Down on his luck, [the screenwriter] Michael Arlen went to New York in 1944. To drown his sorrows he paid a visit to the famous restaurant “21.” In the lobby, he ran into Sam Goldwyn, who offered the somewhat impractical advice that he should buy racehorses. At the bar Arlen met Louis B. Mayer, an old acquaintance, who asked him what were his plans for the future. “I was just talking to Sam Goldwyn ...” began Arlen. “How much did he offer you? ”interrupted Mayer. “Not enough,” he replied evasively. “Would you take fifteen thousand for thirty weeks?” asked Mayer. No hesitation this time. “Yes,” said Arlen.

Poetry is not an esoteric art cultivated by dreamy young men in open collars and with wispy beards. Its finest masters have always been men and women of outstanding energy and great, though by no means common, sense. Poetry is the most economical way of saying certain things that cannot be said in any other way. At its most intense it expresses better than other forms of literature whatever is left of us when we are not involved in instinct-following, surviving, competing, or problem-solving. Its major property is not, as some suppose, beauty. It is power. It is the most powerful form of communication. It does the most work per syllable, operating on a vast field—that of our emotions. It gains its efficiency from the use of certain levers—rhythm, music, rhyme, metaphor, and many more—for which other forms of communication are less well adapted. Some poetry, especially modern poetry, is difficult. But just as our ears have accustomed themselves to difficult music, so our understanding, if we are willing to make an effort, can accustom itself to the most condensed and superficially strange verse. At one time poetry was as democratic an art as the novel is nowadays. It can be so again, if we are willing to make it so.

But it was Archie, the creation of an eccentric radio writer-director named Ed Gardner, who refined the insult and made it an art form. When the tavern was visited by noted critic Clifton Fadiman (the similarity of whose name to Clifton Finnegan needed no elaboration), Archie greeted him with “Whaddaya know, besides everything?” Dancer Vera Zorina was introduced as “da terpsicorpse from da ballet.” To heavyweight party-giver Elsa Maxwell, Archie quipped, “Speakin’ of th’ Four Hundred, how’re you and the other 398?” About highbrow music critic Deems Taylor, Archie informed Duffy: “He’s got no talent of his own, he just talks about the other guys at the Philharmonica.

At 34, Clifton Fadiman had already enjoyed a solid career in letters. Born in Brooklyn in 1904, Fadiman had been an editor at Simon and Schuster and was now, in 1938, book critic for the New Yorker. He was a prodigious reader.

People who believe in The Truth often read one book or a group of books all their lives. For them the last word has been uttered by, say, Thomas Aquinas or Adolf Hitler or Friedrich Nietzsche. Hence they stick to their particular Bible and wear it to shreds. Such readers are almost always psychopaths. A one-book man is a dangerous man and should be taken in hand and taught how to diversify his literary investments.

Jim Trelease: Until the "Call of the Wild", I'd always been aware I was reading a book; that is, I'd yet to be "lost" in one. Jack London gave me my first dose of "virtual reality" decades before the phrase was coined. I went immediately to his "White Fang" and then Jack O'Brien's "Silver Chief" series. For years afterwards I believed the whole experience was peculiar to me. It wasn't until I was in my fifties and read an old essay by Clifton Fadiman that I discovered the experience wasn't peculiar at all, that nearly all lifetime readers experience it with a singular book at some point. Fadiman explained that such a book is like one's first big kiss or first home run - they're unforgettable, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to duplicate or surpass them. In recent years, when my friend Stephen Krashen, the reading researcher, explored Fadiman's theory, he found it to be firmly grounded: teenagers who were avid readers could almost always name their "home run" book while unenthusiastic or reluctant readers could not.

But before it came to that, the show needed a quizmaster, an adult who, like Clifton Fadiman on Information, Please, gave it exactly the right edge. This chair was as vital to the show’s success as were the young panelists. A pair of college professors auditioned: they were too impressed with themselves, giving the kids no time to talk. A candidate from the lecture circuit gave away half the answers. Among the 20-odd people who auditioned was Joe Kelly, a thirdgrade dropout, seasoned vaudevillian, and host of the hayseed music show The National Barn Dance. “His height of intellectual polish before The Quiz Kids was to ring a cowbell and chortle, ‘I’m teakettled pink to be here,’” wrote John Lear in the Saturday Evening Post. Kelly was far from dumb: he had finished third grade a year ahead of schedule but at age 8 had gone into show business.