Now here tonight…my friend just came through the door…and he called me today to tell me this story. He told me before and I asked him to write it out, but he’s been frightfully busy. A little while ago, it might have been say two or three years ago, a friend of his read my book Out of This World and he said to himself…at the time he read it he was about to give up the theater because it was too difficult as he thought. He’s a black man and yes a few big ones have broken through—the Belafontes yes, and the Poitiers yes, and the Eartha Kitts—but so few. He thought it would be simply an impossible task to continue in the theater being a black man. But he read Out of This World and he said, “In this book it said, ‘An assumption, though false, if persisted in will harden into fact.’ When you meet your friend Neville the next time, ask him for me if it doesn’t work then what?” So Benny came to me and told me that this is what he said. The man’s name, by the way, is David Moses. Benny gave me a book to autograph for him and he said, write something in it. Well, I only wrote one little thought from William Blake: “If the fool would persist in his folly, he will become wise.” When he got it, it did something to him…“persisting in my folly, for certainly it is folly to assume that I am what the evidence of my senses deny, reason denies it. So I must persist in my folly?” Yes, and if you do, you’ll prove it and you’ll become wise.515 ¶15