#ore

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

Heart and head are the constituent parts of character; temperament has almost nothing to do with it, and, therefore, character is dependent upon education, and is susceptible of being corrected and improved. ↗

— Giacomo Casanova

#being #character #constituent #corrected #dependent

I am bound to add that the excess in too little has ever proved in me more dangerous than the excess in too much; the last may cause indigestion, but the first causes death. ↗

— Giacomo Casanova

#am #bound #cause #causes #dangerous

The mind of a human being is formed only of comparisons made in order to examine analogies, and therefore cannot precede the existence of memory. ↗

— Giacomo Casanova

#cannot #comparisons #examine #existence #formed

Should I perchance still feel after my death, I would no longer have any doubt, but I would most certainly give the lie to anyone asserting before me that I was dead. ↗

— Giacomo Casanova

#any #anyone #asserting #before #certainly

You will be amused when you see that I have more than once deceived without the slightest qualm of conscience, both knaves and fools. ↗

— Giacomo Casanova

#both #conscience #deceived #fools #i

I know that I can sing really loud. It's like having that really big Evinrude engine on the back of your fishing boat. But I've been trying to be more dynamic with my voice, and not just singing on 10 all of the time out of terror. ↗

— Neko Case

#been #big #boat #dynamic #engine

I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do. ↗

— Leon Uris

#agony #enjoy #i #i think #joy

I'm totally not against plastic surgery. I've tried Botox before. That's the only thing that I've done. ↗

— Kim Kardashian

#before #botox #done #i #only

My father and his brothers were all lawyers, so I think that the expectation was probably for me to grow up to be an attorney, but it never really fascinated me that much. I was more interested in building things. ↗

— Steve Case

#brothers #building #expectation #fascinated #father