Adam Gopnik Quotes

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

For me, there is very little difference between magic and art. To me, the ultimate act of magic is to create something from nothing: It's like when the stage magician pulls the rabbit from the hat.

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

A magician pulls a rabbit from a hat, and actors pull truth from fiction.

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

All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery, a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't.

I am the Mindfreak, there's no Reality! Just this World of Illusion that keeps on haunting me.

What magicians we are, turning darkness into light, transforming invisible atoms into dazzling theater of the world, pulling objects, (people as well as rabbits) out of secret microscopic closets, turning winter into summer, making a palmful of moments disappear through time's trap door. We learned the methods so long ago that they're unconscious, and we've hypnotized ourselves into believing that we're the audience, so I wonder where we served our apprenticeship. Under what master magicians did we learn to form reality so smoothly that we forgot to tell ourselves the secret?

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.

I realized that everything I do is fantasy, whether it is an adult movie or a kids movie.

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

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Magic and new technology have always walked hand in hand - even back in the days of Robert Houdin.

For me, art is make-believe. It's enchantment. It's a fable. I'm enjoying that and playing with it. Of course it's serious, and art is serious, but I'm not going to rarefy it.

In circuses, there is a lot of magic. Things become other things.

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.

Magic is my paint.

Great liars are also great magicians.

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

I consider myself a showman, and I love magic, and I love art, and I love performance, and they're all separate.

Writing, film, sculpture, music: it's all make-believe, really.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

I believe in illusion - I don't believe in magic.

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.

What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.