Keith Barry Quotes

Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology. If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful.

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.

Magicians lose the opportunity to experience a sense of wonder.

And the nature of magic is all in the person's experience. Whether the magician is using a highly complex sleight of hand or he's just got two cards that are the same, it doesn't matter: it's how it's sold and how magical it is for the person that matters.

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

When I first came to L.A., I worked at the Magic Castle, and it was so much fun. But the best part of magic for me these days is not having to do it for a living. It's being able to pull a trick out when people least expect it, when they don't know that you do magic.

Penn and Teller love the very intellectual side of magic. Me, I'm more fun than them. They never look like they're having fun. They look angry.

I'm friends with Criss Angel. Criss has offered me a million times to go downstairs and see the setup. I don't want to see it. I just want to go, 'God, how did you do that?'

I don't want to be 'the magician'; I want to be an innocent bystander along with the magical moment.

It's very exciting to take magic into a new direction, whereas a lot of times magic comes from a place of sort of ego, like, 'Look what I can do that you can't do.' It kind of comes across that way a lot, and you're always trying to challenge the magician; you're always trying to figure out how the magician is doing it.

The goal is to really blur the line. Can you perform a magic trick in a way that someone doesn't think it's a magic trick but is something amazing they haven't seen before? Then they have to wrestle with reality.

I've had dreams about tricks.

Being a pro wrestler can be kind of difficult sometimes. We have a perception about what we do - and I totally understand the perception, because we're a weekly episodic program, and we're having fun all the time, so people think that's kind of the most talented thing I could do.

Magic is not about having a puzzle to solve. It's about creating a moment of awe and astonishment. And that can be a beautiful thing.

The art of a magician is to create wonder. If we live with a sense of wonder, our lives become filled with joy.

Everything that I spent my entire life dedicated to, which is this art of mentalism, of magic... I don't see it and feel it and experience it like I first did when I was getting involved in this art. I try to look at it as a spectator but unless I get amnesia I still can't overlook that. I can appreciate the performance but I would love to be fooled.

It's still magic even if you know how it's done.

I am often dishonest in my techniques ... I happily admit to cheating, it's all part of the game. I hope some of the fun for the viewer comes from not knowing what's real and what isn't

One of the things that Teller and I are obsessed with, one of the reasons that we're in magic, is the difference between fantasy and reality.

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.

David Blaine, I think, was the first TV magician to really turn the camera around and make it about the spectator's experience. That's really what magic is all about.

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.

Anyone can learn a trick, but to make it entertaining, to put a presentation twist on it, and then to take it out there and really amaze people is a whole different ball game. You have to have some kind of a natural ability to do that, I suppose.

There is no magic. There are only magicians.