Lance Burton Quotes

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.

Before he died, Harry said that his wife knew everything about every trick that he did, and that she knew how they all worked. It was interesting to play with that idea, and to find the places where she really was afraid for his safety and where she was playing along. I had to find that line between what's a performance and what's real, and that's so much of what magic is, as well. It was really, really fun. They were really partners, in every sense of the word.

That's the beauty of it. Have you seen the contraptions these magicians build to accomplish the most mundane feats? They are a bunch of fish covered in feathers trying to convince the public they can fly, I am simply a bird in their midst.

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.

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

If people are fans of 'Mindfreak,' they are going to be so excited with 'Believe.' They are actually going to see those illusions that people think can only happen with trick photography.

You can watch actors create their illusions, but if you don't see where they get the pigeons from, you don't really know how they're doing it.

I started performing when I was 9 or 10, doing magic.

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.

I was damn lucky to choose this profession. I had no idea when I started out that I was really an illusionist and a magician.

There are people who try to figure things out. Often, magic is presented in a way that sets up a challenge that I actually find kind of appalling. You know, "I'm clever, I can do something, and you don't know what it is." And that instills in the audience the idea that, "Yes, I do. You're not that clever."

To label Jason Randal a magician does a disservice. You'll think the laws of physics, nature, the universe itself have been suspended. He's as good as Houdini was at his best!

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.

Like a stage magician, the con artist misdirects suspicion. While everyone’s watching for him to pull a rabbit out of a hat, he’s actually sawing a girl in half. You think he’s doing one trick when he’s actually doing another. You think that I’m dying, but I’m laughing at you.

The great trouble with magicians is the fact that they believe when they have bought a certain trick or piece of apparatus, and know the method of procedure, that they are full-fledged mystifiers.

"Do you like card tricks?" "No, I hate card tricks," I answered. "Well, I'll just show you this one." He showed me three.

Magic things are fond of deceptions.

I like being fooled. When I watch someone who does sleight-of-hand and fools me, it's a great feeling.

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.

One of the reasons I don't like to use the word "tricks" , I do think of them as theatrical pieces, and as pretentious as that might sound, there's a real reason for it. It's not the idea of tricking you; it's the idea of taking you along on this particular journey the way you would in any other theatrical situation. But, hopefully, you're going to be fooled at the end.

It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician--but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery. Those in the audience are embarrassed to have been so easily astonished, and they blame the performer for their gullibility.

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.

One magician demanded I show him an image of the love of his life. I rustled up a mirror.

On my fortieth birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a midlife crisis I decided it might be more interesting to actually terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself to be a magician.

If there was a trick, there must be a trickster.