David Copperfield Quotes

Because I have been a magician for many years, people have often asked me whether I ever have sawn a woman in half. I reply, Oh, yes I've sawn over seventy women in half in my lifetime, and I'm learning the second half of the trick now.

I am a street performer as much as I am a stage performer. Yes, I have a television show, but every trick, every 'Mindfreak' you see, I can do live.

I intend to do the Penn & Teller show until they pry my cheesy magic wand from my cold dead fingers.

Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough to think that they always observe with rigorous and objective scrutiny, and therefore could never be so fooled while ordinary mortals know perfectly well that good performers can always find a way to trick people.

Houdini used to pull rabbits out of a hat, but he never tried to make a living out of selling them when he had pulled them out of the hat

I'm the luckiest man in the world - performing 500 shows a year and loving what I do - illusion IS my day to day life.

I only have two kinds of dreams: the bad and the terrible. Bad dreams I can cope with. They're just nightmares, and the end eventually. I wake up. The terrible dreams are the good dreams. In my terrible dreams, everything is fine. I am still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened. Sometimes I'm married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything's wonderful and normal and fine. And then I wake up, and I'm still me. And I'm still here. And that is truly terrible.

Robert Duvall taught me years ago. He said, "You know theatre is not real. I don't like plays." You know, he doesn't like plays. And I agree with him in certain ways, you know. They can be fun. I don't mind going to see them. I went and saw Phantom of the Opera. I thought hey, that's cool. Look at the mask and all that.

I fell in love with magic acts and bridged into that.

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.

One day, when I was about eight years old, some kids pushed me on stage at school during a talent show because they knew I could sing.

I think the need to go on stage speaks to some sort of a profound psychological deficit, but something that happened when you were a kid. Or something your parents did.

When they saw me walking down the street smoking a cigar, they'd say, 'Hey, that 14-year-old kid may be going places.' Of course it's also a good prop on the stage ... When you can't think of what you're supposed to say next, you can puff on your cigar until you think of your next line.

I think loads of people see acting, when they're kids, as these magical stories that just happen within the context of the film or the play or the cartoon or whatever they're seeing. They don't imagine that there are actually people that go and do that for a living.

Disappearing act? That's a magic trick, isn't it? I like magic tricks!

When I started doing my act, I wasn't married and didn't have kids. I was probably 29 years old. Some people say that's not a kid, but when you're 50, and you look back to when you were 30, you were a kid. You look back on your 30s and think, "I was an idiot!" But I would just do things then I thought were funny. I couldn't have cared less who thought anything about it.

I think the best thing about being dumb is that it makes magic a lot better. Where the hell did that rat come from? I dunno, but I'm calling the cops because he just cut that lady in half.

I want to say it to so many people, 'why you have to be so serious?' And I also want people to think 'this kid has really gone crazy' when they see my performance on the stage. Luckily, I am able to achieve all of these.

I think that it's important not to take [acting] too seriously. It's all pretend. It's a strange job.

I could vanish the silk better than Ben Vereen - that was for sure. So I think maybe they said, "Okay, maybe he has something to offer." Years pass and I get a bit of a career, and Ben Vereen ends up hosting one of my specials where I walked through the Great Wall of China. Things came full circle in kind of an ironic way, when you have that honor of people that have influenced you so much host your show. It's a huge experience in your life.

When I had kids I sort of went into a hole for a few years and I think when I came out of that, I started to really become myself and know what works on me.

When you're a kid, you think you can jump out the window and be okay. But when you get older, you think, "Wait a minute - I can't fly!"

Now you see me, now you don't. George thinks he will, but I know he won't!

I can kid people, including myself, into believing that something on the page will work. But when you film it, you just think, "Oh ...".

Magicians are definitely more arrogant. They're kind of like "Abra Kadabra, you're an idiot," they don't let you in on the joke. Comedians, you're always in on the joke unless it's Andy Kaufman.