David Copperfield Quotes

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.

In magic, it takes two or three years for me to create a 5-minute illusion for me to get it to the level I want.

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.'

I've been doing magic since I was five years old, and when I was trying to get acting gigs, I found I could make a good living at it. It's great to kind of shake the cobwebs off and get the feeling of a live audience again. I love close-up magic, the card stuff, the coin stuff, the really up-close David Blaine stuff.

Magic is all about directing attention. If I didn't want you to look at my right hand then I don't look at it.

When I did my first few television specials, my illusions were so advanced that it took a couple of years before the other illusionists could even figure out what I was doing, let alone try to imitate me.

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.

I consider myself a showman, and I love magic, and I love art, and I love performance, and they're all separate.

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.

I intend to do the Penn & Teller show until they pry my cheesy magic wand from my cold dead fingers.

The problem with stage magic is that it looks really good, but everyone knows there's a trick box.

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

I started performing when I was 9 or 10, doing magic.

I love anything to do with ventriloquism and magic.

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.

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.

A magician pulls a rabbit from a hat, and actors pull truth from fiction.

Before he died, Harry said that his wife knew everything about every trick that he did, and that she knew how they all worked. It was interesting to play with that idea, and to find the places where she really was afraid for his safety and where she was playing along. I had to find that line between what's a performance and what's real, and that's so much of what magic is, as well. It was really, really fun. They were really partners, in every sense of the word.

Magic is the only profession where it's easy to lie about your talent. If you do a trick and you can learn it very quickly, you can fool somebody into thinking you're a great magician.

Magic things are fond of deceptions.

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.

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'm fascinated by the similarities and differences between comedians and magicians.

To seek in a Sheep five feet when there is but four.

I've never been a puppeteer, I conceive and I write and I design and I direct. And not just puppets. I direct actors, I direct dancers, I direct singers, I direct films. I also direct puppeteers. I'm really a theatre maker, but there's not a word for that.