CLIFTON FADIMAN

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.

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

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

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.

My son is 7 years old. I am 54. It has taken me a great many years to reach that age. I am more respected in the community, I am stronger, I am more intelligent and I think I am better than he is. I don't want to be a pal, I want to be a father.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one.

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

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

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

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

Cheese is milk's leap toward immortality.

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

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

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

To feel at home, stay at home.

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

As between mileage and experience choose experience.

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

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.

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

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

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

A person born in the middle class, as I was, educated in bourgeois institutions, … is poorly prepared to take a leading part in revolutionary activity.