Clifton Fadiman Quotes

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.

When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book 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 didn’t know you knew.

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.