David Copperfield Quotes

To obfuscate the reconstruction of the effect - when a magician is fooled by another magician doing magic. In my career that's not been the major passion, but it's been the passion of a number of my mentors. The crowning achievement for them would be to create magic good enough to fool other magicians.

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

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.

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

Penn & Teller stopped doing practical jokes, and the reason is we got much too good at it.

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

There is no magic. There are only magicians.

Ive said its a little bit like a magician performing for a convention of magicians... all the magicians in the audience watching this illusion-Do they see the illusion, or do they see the device that made the illusion? Probably they see a little of both.

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.

Scientists are the easiest to fool. ... They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurors-they terrify me. Scientists are no problem; against them I feel quite confident.

Magicians are the most honest people in the world; they tell you they're gonna fool you, and then they do it.

Magic things are fond of deceptions.

I know magicians and I know magic and I say this: all magicians lie and this one more than most.

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.

I hate giving away tricks, you have to create an impression and not an image. You want audiences to look at certain places and not look at other places. And when you've got the help of modern-day abilities with technology, it's a much more natural look.

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.

In circuses, there is a lot of magic. Things become other things.

Great liars are also great magicians.

People would read all kinds of reaction into it, but Tracy told me himself that half the time he was just standing very still, trying to look sober and composed. That takes nothing away from him. The fact he got away with it was a tribute to his talent.

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.

The key is for the audience never to know, so I have a plan B for every illusion.

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

Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.

The real secret of magic lies in the performance.

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.