Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Great liars are also great magicians.
There is no magic. There are only magicians.
Magicians lose the opportunity to experience a sense of wonder.
I was always interested in enchantment and magicians and still am.
It is the unspoken ethic of all magicians to not reveal the secrets.
Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.
For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.
The pain is bad magicians ripping off good ones, doing magic badly, and making a mockery of the art.
Nobody who is a Penn & Teller fan thinks of us first and foremost as magicians, but as a comedy team.
Actors and magicians are both performers, and they represent things that are not necessarily who they are.
Magicians will always tell you the trick is the most important thing, but I'm more interested in telling a story.
In 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,' I wanted to create the most convincing story of magic and magicians that I could.
Generally, magicians don't know what to say, so they say stupid and redundant crap like, 'Here I am holding a red ball.'
I never thought about doing a sequel when I was actually writing 'The Magicians.' I only ever considered it a standalone.
My first audition for 'The Magicians' came up in conversation with a close friend who, right then, handed me the first book.
I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.
I was the youngest member of the New York International Brotherhood of Magicians. It was me and a bunch of 60-year-old Jewish men.
Magicians from the nineteenth century threw cards distances, but I think I'm the first one who made a thing about using them as weapons.
In a way, we are magicians. We are alchemists, sorcerers and wizards. We are a very strange bunch. But there is great fun in being a wizard.
It was just like a digital fixation with cards and math and science and then I started to look at images of great magicians from Houdini down the line.
I always really liked magicians. I'm not even sure why - except that they know things other people don't, and they live in untidy rooms full of strange objects.
Mentalist is the technical term for what I do and it covers everything from psychic medium through Uri Geller, through to magicians doing tricks with a mental theme.
I never talk much about my family, but my grandfather was friendly with these guys, with magicians and ventriloquists on the highest levels, and I was just... interested.
Ever since I was a kid and watched magicians on stage, like David Copperfield or Siegfried and Roy, I instantly knew how they did everything. In my head, it just all worked.
Indeed, most magicians catch the bug as kids. My first audience was my family in Long Island. My first 'assistant' was my mother, whom I levitated on a broom in our living room.
I was considered a comedy magician. And - how do I put this without sounding egotistical? - it didn't take me long to realize that comedy magicians usually couldn't do comedy or magic.
Like every art form, there are jealousies and angers and competitiveness in magic. But there's camaraderie among magicians, whether you perform it for a living or you're an enthusiast.
Chicago is a big town for magicians and card hustlers. So when I was very young, a fellow sat me down and taught me the Three-Card Monte. And that kind of put me in a - pointed me towards easy money.
Actors are like magicians. They'll sit there and do all their tricks to each other. It's very competitive, and the goal is to get them bonding, to get them to know the real person as quickly as possible.
For me, I live for performing live because people look at magicians on television, and they always wonder, 'Is it a camera trick?' 'Is it a stooge?' whereas, live, they know there's no set-ups; there's no stooges.
My mother brought me magicians and witches, because I was very ugly, really revolting. So she thought somebody had put a spell on me - this is the truth - so she made me drink some horrible terrifying potions, for year.
As a coach, we are not magicians; we work with the players and look to improve them and give them every opportunity, but if you are not creating or scoring goals over a consistent period of time, it is difficult for you as a coach.
I always wanted to go to the Chavez school but I could never afford it when I was growing up so a lot of my learning came from magic books and watching other magicians. I was also very lucky that I had a couple of really good magic teachers.
Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people's buttons, you can play them like a piano.
Suits are malevolent magicians' sleeves for socialists, full of patrician loops and tricks, small, embroidered, cryptic messages of deference and privilege. They are ever the uniform of the enemy. They are also the greatest British invention ever.
Magicians are typically introverted; they don't tend to work with others, but I work with software programmers, composers, designers, so it's a very diverse group and the result is always more interesting than something I could have done by myself.
Dai Vernon, the greatest sleight of hand figure in the history of the art, rarely performed. But he invented magic and had an enormous influence on the whole range of sleight of hand. And so often, the magic he was doing was to fool other magicians.
I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn't love them.
The cosmetics world and mentalism are both arenas of deception, but I suppose the difference is that mentalists and magicians are more honest about it. People tell me I have good skin, and I tell them the magic secret is E45 cream: cheap, cheerful, and very effective.
Because 'Gob' was a terrible magician, he was always, in great comedic moments, messing up his magic act. We used to have magicians come in to work on these tricks to actually get them wrong. But they still had to work. We had to bring magicians on to make magic not work.
First of all, magicians practice a lot. It requires a lot of discipline. Second, you can't be afraid to be a leader, to go onstage, and you learn to have presence. You need to be able to visualize and connect and create. Most important, you learn to think outside the box.
To obfuscate the reconstruction of the effect - when a magician is fooled by another magician doing magic. In my career that's not been the major passion, but it's been the passion of a number of my mentors. The crowning achievement for them would be to create magic good enough to fool other magicians.
When you look back over 100 years when stop-motion was really at the dawn of cinema, a lot of the ways it developed was you had stage magicians who were looking to bring their illusions to life, and one of the ways they did that, at the time, was through cinema and stop-motion. They developed these processes.
I'm such a proponent of the theatrical experience and the cinematic experience, and we've reached this point where the magicians are not only giving away their tricks, but they're telling us how they're doing the tricks in advance before you even come to the magic show. It'd be nice to get a little of the mystery back in.
You can just go to a magic shop or magic builder and buy what most magicians do, but that's not what I'm about. With 'Mindfreak' on television and 'Believe' live, I want to bring things that people have never seen before. That process is very difficult. It's very challenging, and you never know how long it's going to take - months or years.