Generally, magicians don't know what to say, so they say stupid and redundant crap like, 'Here I am holding a red ball.'
I've always been a cabaret-vaudeville artist - an hourlong cabaret and a floor show in a hotel - somebody like that. That's my main forte.
I'm a fan of old vaudeville theaters.
I was always interested in enchantment and magicians and still am.
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.
Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.
I was always fascinated by fairy stories, fantasy, you know, demons, necromancers, gods and goddesses, everything that is out of our kin and out of our everyday world. I was always interested in enchantment and magicians and still am.
I always say that I love magic but I hate magicians. I like being fooled. If you wave your hands in front of my face and I think you're doing a trick, I'm easily impressed. If you pull a quarter out of my ear, I'm quite certain you're a wizard. But I don't like the way most magicians don't act like they're magical; they act like show business dicks.
For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.
Actors and magicians are both performers, and they represent things that are not necessarily who they are.
When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy.
Do you realize how much better the world would be if we all just treated each other the same way black dudes treat magicians?
In 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,' I wanted to create the most convincing story of magic and magicians that I could.
Like every art form, there are jealousies and angers and competitiveness in magic. But there's camaraderie among magicians, whether you perform it for a living or you're an enthusiast.
The pain is bad magicians ripping off good ones, doing magic badly, and making a mockery of the art.
Moses tried to separate his people from Pharaoh, and when he tried, the magicians tried to fool the people into staying with the Pharaoh, and we look upon these other organizations that are trying to get Negroes to integrate with this doomed white man as nothing but modern-day magicians, and The Honorable Elijah Muhammad is a modern-day Moses trying to separate us from the modern-day Pharaoh.
Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.
Magicians are definitely more arrogant. They're kind of like "Abra Kadabra, you're an idiot," they don't let you in on the joke. Comedians, you're always in on the joke unless it's Andy Kaufman.
I read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century.
Nobody who is a Penn & Teller fan thinks of us first and foremost as magicians, but as a comedy team.
Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?
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.
In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.
Theft annoys me more than anything else. The purloining of effects from another magician. Some people think it's massive to steal the secrets of nuclear reactors, but to steal a card move is trivial. They're wrong.
