Clifton Fadiman Quotes

A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.

I love books that stand the test of time.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.

Great books conserve time.

My books and other works are my legacy, and it's a great comfort to know that mine is a legacy of pleasure for other people.

I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.

Of course you should study whatever you want. The written appreciation and understanding of literature, or any kind of artistic endeavour, is absolutely central to a decent society. Why d'you think books are the first things that the fascists burn?

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

I think, oh my god, kids are reading, and they care about a book enough to come over and talk to me about a book that they care about. If I think about it as being a celebrity, it would freak me out. But I just think, lucky me, that I get to be a part of this whole thing.

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

Nor sequent centuries could hitOrbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.

I do not remember a time since I have been capable of loving books that I have not loved Shakespeare.

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

A classic is a book that remains in print

There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.

We live for books.

How can you tell? That I like books, I mean. The look on your face when you walked in, somehow I doubted you were that impressed by me.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

And I still buy books at B&N, Borders and Elliot Bay ... I probably shouldn't admit this. But I don't care. I love great bookstores.

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

I woke up one morning and realized that what I wanted to say to everyone - children, young people, adults - was: Read for your life.