Clifton Fadiman

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

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.

Reading to small children is a specialty.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheese - milk's leap toward immortality.

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

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.

Don't be afraid of poetry.

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.