Keith Barry Quotes

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

I love magic. Like, 'pull a scarf out of your fake thumb' magic. I have a legit bag of 'Magic Stuff' in my garage.

We all enjoy a magic show, but we don't demand a Q&A afterward explaining how it was done.

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.

What I've tried to do in my stage magic is to take a trick and give it an emotional hook.

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

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.

If you do magic, it's the quickest most fraudulent route to impressing people.

I always wanted to do magic tricks - I feel like that could be the the next wave.

I always say that I love magic but I hate magicians. I like being fooled. If you wave your hands in front of my face and I think you're doing a trick, I'm easily impressed. If you pull a quarter out of my ear, I'm quite certain you're a wizard. But I don't like the way most magicians don't act like they're magical; they act like show business dicks.

I discovered at the age of six that everything was a phony, worked with mirrors. Since then, I've always wanted to be a magician.

Magicians will always tell you the trick is the most important thing, but I'm more interested in telling a story.

But when I go off stage I don't have a deck of cards with me all the time.

I don't think you can say something is or isn't magic. That's what was cool about Houdini, because he was a magician who had a magic show, but he was also an escape artist, and they kind of, over time, blended together. They both kind of enhance each other, I think.

You have to learn certain skills to present magic.

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.

I've been doing magic since I was five years old, and when I was trying to get acting gigs, I found I could make a good living at it. It's great to kind of shake the cobwebs off and get the feeling of a live audience again. I love close-up magic, the card stuff, the coin stuff, the really up-close David Blaine stuff.

Of course, in all magic tricks there's a secret.

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 did magic at children's parties when I was a kid.

One of my rules is never explain. A writer is a lot like a magician, if you explain how the trick works then a lot of the magic turns mundane.

Indian street magic tends to be very gory, blood and guts. One trick is for a magician to take a knife and appear to cut his kid's head almost off. The magician then says to the crowd, 'Well I can continue to cut off my son's head or you can all give me some money.' Then he wanders around and takes 10 rupees from everyone and restores his son.

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

I think there's a huge amount of magic on television, which is slightly vapid: there's no real meaning or message behind it; it is simply a trick.

Well, I also love magic, which is, you know, different than showmanship. Magic's an art where you use slight of hand or illusion to create wonder.