Clifton Fadiman Quotes

James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.

Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well; or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill.

I am a writer of fragments.

A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional.

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

Writers who can't invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn't paint people, so he painted chairs.

To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like

The literary gift is a mere accident - is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.

The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers.

Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.

All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

See I'm a poet to some, a regular modern day Shakespeare.

Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish.

I don't write, I build a rhyme.

I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

If you don't know what to play, play nothing.

I'd try to write my poems in a certain rhythm. I had my rock 'n' roll stuff for performing and my denser stuff for writing.