Jodi Picoult Quotes

There's something about the Houdini act that is not always made clear - about the escape act in general.

When you're learning how to do magic, the first rule is 'never reveal a secret.' In a way, by telling someone I'm a magician, it kind of gives away the best secret of all... How interesting to take the magician out of the equation of a magic show.

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

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

When we go to play, you flip around and flash around and everything, and then they're not gonna see nothin' but what their eyes see. Forget about their ears.

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.

The eating of burning brimstone is an entirely fake performance.

The skills that we have are the actual magic skills - not the performing skills. We have to separate those. But the actual skills that make the tricks work, we don't get to use again.

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

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.'

The real secret of magic lies in the performance.

Magic is an art form where you lie and tell people you are lying.

Magic, whether it's mind magic or conjuring, is about the cheapest and quickest way of impressing people, and I think if you don't grow out of that as a magician then it shows, and people get a bit sick of that after a while, because it starts to feel like posturing. So I grew out of it.

Magic has both feet planted in cheap vaudeville and childish posturing; in dishonesty and therefore not in art.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It's a vain craft, acting.

As an actor, I feel one should use his look to trick people.

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

When the fans were watching my dad, you could never tell if this was real or is this fake, and that's what made him so special. Every ounce of energy went to being The Nature Boy.

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

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.