No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won't start.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.

A man that ain't willin' to cheat for a poke don't want it bad enough.

Members of the Academy are mostly urban people. We are an urban nation. We are not a rural nation. It's not easy even to get a rural story made.

One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.

Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.

Self-parody is the first portent of age.

True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends' boyfriends - and he accepts it.

No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won't start.

If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.

If you wait all that happens is that you get older.

If you wait all that happens is you get older.

In times of crisis human beings dont have it in them to be rational.

The whole point of loyalty was not to change stick with those who stuck with you.

I dont see how being married could be any worse than listening to you talk for twenty years but that still aint much of a recommendation for it.

Yesterdays gone on down the river and you cant get it back.

The older the violin, the sweeter the music.

Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or on the ball.

A woman should be an illusion.

Right now, there's the illusion of order and civilization, but there's a tremendous amount of economic tension in this country and the educational system is constantly eroding.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.

Do not be misled by what you see around you, or be influenced by what you see. You live in a world which is a playground of illusion, full of false paths, false values and false ideals. But you are not part of that world.

It was either Voltaire or Charlie Sheen who said, 'We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. And anything in between that can give us the illusion that we're not, we cling to.'

It is pure illusion to think that an opinion that passes down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

We're living under the illusion that we have the power to determine what to do with it.

They're not even within 100 miles of Baghdad. They are not in any place. They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion... they are trying to sell to the others an illusion.

When playing a role, I would feel more comfortable, as you're given a prescribed way of behaving. So, both Facebook and theatre provide contrived settings that provide the illusion of social interaction.

If you understand hallucination and illusion, you don't blindly follow any leader. You must know if the person is sane or insane, over the abyss.

We're in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.

Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

People have the illusion that all over the world, all the time, all kinds of fantastic things are happening. When in fact, over most of the world, most of the time, nothing is happening.

You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.

Being a famous actress may give you a sense of being important, but believe me, it's just an illusion.

The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion, or delusion.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.

I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.

The occupation and robbery of a nation occurs under the illusion of freeing its citizens from brutal oppression.

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.