Teller Quotes

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.

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.

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.

I wish what I do was all real. Some of it's real, some of it's an illusion and I try to blur the line between both, but unfortunately I've got to be honest with you. Taking a $1 bill and turning it into a $100 - unfortunately it's not real.

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.

There is not a physicist in the world who can perceive when a parlor magician palms off playing-cards.

All magic is 'Here’s a quarter, now it’s gone. You’re a jerk. Now it’s back. You’re an idiot. Show’s over.'

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.

You have to learn certain skills to present magic.

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

If there are two things Penn & Teller stand for, it's the truth & lying, although not necessarily in that order.

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.

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

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.

Magic's an art where you use slight of hand or illusion to create wonder. And I was just intrigued with that idea.

I'm doing everything I can to take the magician out of the equation of magic.

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.

If you do sleight of hand without trying to cheat someone, that's what magic is.

A clever conjurer is welcome anywhere, and those of us whose powers of entertainment are limited to the setting of booby-traps or the arranging of apple-pie beds must view with envy the much greater tribute of laughter and applause which is the lot of the prestidigitator with some natural gift for legerdemain.

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.

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.