Teller Quotes

For me, the most exciting thing is to create good magic that's entertaining for an audience, and it would be lovely if a magician was fooled as well.

As a kid, I kind of spent my life being amazed by being tricked. I love being tricked. I still love it today.

I want to bring magic back to where it started, which is not about the props, and it's not about me as a magician: it's about the audience and playing with their minds and playing with their perception of magic and having fun with it.

When a magician lets you notice something on your own, his lie becomes impenetrable.

If you want to talk about magic, the stuff that blows me away is the stuff that's done close up.

My goal was becoming the next David Copperfield. I learned how to be a performer by emulating him as a kid - his formula of just talking to people onstage, being free to improvise, being charming and witty with a crowd, together with great, beautiful magic.

The goal is to really blur the line. Can you perform a magic trick in a way that someone doesn't think it's a magic trick but is something amazing they haven't seen before? Then they have to wrestle with reality.

For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.

When I first came to L.A., I worked at the Magic Castle, and it was so much fun. But the best part of magic for me these days is not having to do it for a living. It's being able to pull a trick out when people least expect it, when they don't know that you do magic.

I'm not a big fan of doing it because I get really frustrated because I can't do any of the tricks, but I love to watch magic.

One day, I saw a magic show, and I was like, 'I have to learn how to do this!' Every time I went to Las Vegas, I had to get at least two or three tricks from the magic shops.

The problem with stage magic is that it looks really good, but everyone knows there's a trick box.

Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.

I don't put a girl in a box and clap my hands three times, and she's gone. I get in the box, and I vanish, and I reappear at the other side of the stage. That way, people don't think, 'That's a great illusion.' They think, 'Doug's a great magician.'

All types of magic performance have a purpose. Even if it's an amateur who's trying out slight of hand on YouTube.

I've always performed magic as a kid.

Magic is like special effects live, and I love to perform, so it sounded like doing magic tricks were a good way to entertain people.

It's very exciting to take magic into a new direction, whereas a lot of times magic comes from a place of sort of ego, like, 'Look what I can do that you can't do.' It kind of comes across that way a lot, and you're always trying to challenge the magician; you're always trying to figure out how the magician is doing it.

In my business, my job is to make people believe they are seeing something they're not seeing.

Magic is the only profession where it's easy to lie about your talent. If you do a trick and you can learn it very quickly, you can fool somebody into thinking you're a great magician.

There is not a physicist in the world who can perceive when a parlor magician palms off playing-cards.

The art of a magician is to create wonder. If we live with a sense of wonder, our lives become filled with joy.

Scientists are the easiest to fool. ... They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurors-they terrify me. Scientists are no problem; against them I feel quite confident.

Magicians are the most honest people in the world; they tell you they're gonna fool you, and then they do it.

It's still magic even if you know how it's done.