Michael Carbonaro Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?'

But the whole idea of the transformation... mystery, transformation, and manipulations - those were the things that Marcel was a magician at. That's his magic.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I find revealing the secrets of magic quite reprehensible.

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

Magic is the Special Olympics of entertainment.

I'm not a big fan of doing it because I get really frustrated because I can't do any of the tricks, but I love to watch magic.

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

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.

Whether you're shuffling a deck of cards or holding your breath, magic is pretty simple: It comes down to training, practice, and experimentation, followed up by ridiculous pursuit and relentless perseverance.

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.