#illusion

Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal's great foe William F. Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to Firing Line when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right's less towering intellects as my foil. The response to the show made my day, and then my week. Yet almost every time I go to a TV studio, I feel faintly guilty. This is pre-eminently the 'soft' world of dream and illusion and 'perception': it has only a surrogate relationship to the 'hard' world of printed words and written-down concepts to which I've tried to dedicate my life, and that surrogate relationship, while it, too, may be 'verbal,' consists of being glib rather than fluent, fast rather than quick, sharp rather than pointed. It means reveling in the fact that I have a meretricious, want-it-both-ways side. My only excuse is to say that at least I do not pretend that this is not so. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#cable-television #cable-television-in-the-us #conservatism #conservatism-in-the-us #gore-vidal

Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth. ↗

— Ludwig Borne

#illusion #losing #makes #than #truth

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#hugs #illusion #knows #loneliness #lonely

I've never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind. Apart from the beauty of looks and figure, which I cannot claim to have, there's just a particular kind of ordinary-Joe quality that a film star needs to have. ↗

— Stephen Fry

#actor #any #apart #beauty #because

In this life struggle, here I am among you fully cognizant that a true believer has no fear of what God has ordained for him. Those who are visited by fear live only for their present, under the illusion that the world began with them and will end with their departure. ↗

— King Hussein I

#among #began #believer #cognizant #departure

Let there be no illusions about the difficulty of forming this kind of a national community. It's tough, difficult, not easy. But a spirit of harmony will survive in America only if each of us remembers that we share a common destiny. ↗

— Barbara Jordan

#america #common #community #destiny #difficult

It's really easy to get colors right. It's really hard to get black - and neutrals - right. Black is certainly a color but it's also an illusion. ↗

— Donna Karan

#black #certainly #color #colors #easy

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion. ↗

— Arthur Koestler

#illusion #more #nothing #sad #than

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered. ↗

— Stanley Kubrick

#been #brilliantly #consoling #create #illusion

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone. ↗