James Randi Quotes

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

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.

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

All types of magic performance have a purpose. Even if it's an amateur who's trying out slight of hand on YouTube.

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

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.

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.

I suppose that if I could only do one thing, a solid card effect would be pretty high on the list. That's the root of it all, sleight-of-hand. It's certainly the thing I feel most comfortable with.

But when I go off stage I don't have a deck of cards with me all the time.

Actors and magicians are both performers, and they represent things that are not necessarily who they are.

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.

He spent hours and hours and hours practising these conjuring tricks. It's just such a curious thing.

You have to learn certain skills to present magic.

Magic is the oldest part of the show business profession. It can now be used as a forward-thinking tool to build a child's confidence. It has been an amazing part in many entertainers' lives, including Steve Martin and the late Johnny Carson.

I'm such a proponent of the theatrical experience and the cinematic experience, and we've reached this point where the magicians are not only giving away their tricks, but they're telling us how they're doing the tricks in advance before you even come to the magic show. It'd be nice to get a little of the mystery back in.

Generally, magicians don't know what to say, so they say stupid and redundant crap like, 'Here I am holding a red ball.'

I am a street performer as much as I am a stage performer. Yes, I have a television show, but every trick, every 'Mindfreak' you see, I can do live.

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

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.

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 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.

The real secret of magic lies in the performance.