“Volunteers from the audience sometimes participate in preparation. As the trick is being setup, the magician will make use of every possible use of misdirection.”
“You never understood, why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special... you really don’t know?... it was... it was the look on their faces..”.
“That the orator’s own character should look right is particularly important in political speaking: that the audience should be in the right frame of mind, in lawsuits.”
“But as soon as he had uttered his foolish tirade, he felt he had been talking absurd nonsense, and at once longed to prove to his audience, and above all to himself, that he had not been talking nonsense.”
“The prospect of those visiting hours, for which the starvation artist naturally yearned, since they were the meaning of his life, also made him shudder.”
“Once a month an undercover narcotics agent of the county was assigned at random to speak before bubblehead gatherings such as this. Today was his turn. Looking at his audience, he realized how much he detested straights.”
″(Their relationship) existed to no one but themselves: it seemed something sacred, and fought-for, and unique to them…in it, he played a role for one other person, and that person was his only audience, and no one else ever saw it, no matter how much they thought they might.”