Writing takes gall. I like to think that's true even for writers with several books under their belt, writers who have been doing it for years. It takes something - guts, gumption, self-delusion - to ask for a reader's time when we all know there's nothing new under the sun; that it's all been said, or written, before.

Rumaan Alam

When self-delusion and self-flattery enter the mind-set of a product team and the metrics they judge themselves by, like the first plague rat coming onto a ship, the end is practically preordained.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

Politicians or pundits can distort or cherry-pick climate science any way they want to try and gain temporary influence with the public. But any serious industrialist who's facing 'climate exposure' - as it's now called by money managers - cannot afford to engage in that sort of self-delusion.

Clive Thompson

I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it's no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else!

Daniel Day-Lewis

Our brains are very, very good at self-delusion. What happens is, it releases the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which leads to foggy thinking, so you're not even able to judge well whether you're working well or not.

Daniel Levitin

Self-delusion is one of the funniest things there is.

Douglas Coupland

Self-delusion is rarely a good strategy for effective management.

Eva Moskowitz

What we can afford least is to define the problem of future war as we would like it to be and, by doing so, introduce into our defense vulnerabilities based on self-delusion.

H. R. McMaster

Children tell themselves stories, engage in self-delusion and fantasy, but those narratives are more evolving than calcified - and with that malleability comes both freedom and danger.

Laura van den Berg

I've gotten to jump into a lot of different things. And either being bold enough or dumb enough or naive enough to believe I could play them all, it's an exercise of self-delusion.

Michael Potts

Self-delusion is pulling in your stomach when you step on the scales.

Paul Sweeney

Writing takes gall. I like to think that's true even for writers with several books under their belt, writers who have been doing it for years. It takes something - guts, gumption, self-delusion - to ask for a reader's time when we all know there's nothing new under the sun; that it's all been said, or written, before.

Rumaan Alam

I surely don't think ignorance is bliss. But like everything else that has survived thousands of years of human evolution, ignorance - like denial, self-delusion, and magical thinking - seems to have its uses.

Scott Spencer

Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.'

Stephen Sondheim

I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.

Terry Gross