The real secret of magic lies in the performance.
The most important thing is presentation.
It wasn't just about doing tricks. It's about taking an audience to another place, a special place, so they can really suspend their disbelief. Its about amazing the audience as well as moving them.
Magicians lose the opportunity to experience a sense of wonder.
Before there can be wonders, there must be wonder.
I will now make a scorpion appear in Osama bin Laden's pants
It is the unspoken ethic of all magicians to not reveal the secrets.
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.
[ Gil Cates] said, "You've got a point of view with your magic. There's this comedy to it, there's drama. You're telling stories with magic."
I really wanted to succeed. I wanted to be accepted. I read every magic book that I possibly could, studied every move, and by the time I was 12, they really accepted me, they embraced me.
Everyone was talking about having airplanes disappear. And I said, "Wait, wait, wait. That's what you like? I'd tell you a story about something like my girlfriend leaving me, and the magic was really hard. The airplane thing was comparatively easy, and people liked that thing?" I realized at that moment, the power of the simple idea.
I try to help people realize their dreams by using magic to tell stories that educate, move, and inspire.
From the very beginning, I studied acting, directing, lighting, dance and movement. I didn't rely on just the magic to take place. It's a shame that a lot of magicians just rely on the trick itself and they have no other abilities. They get away with the wonder factor, and I don't think that's enough. It's great, but it's not enough.
Magic was a thing that, when I did it, it made all the kids go, "Ah, that's cool."
I had a point of view, which was different. I looked at magic as theater, as storytelling, and I tried to have an approach that was different from what they were doing. "How can I move people and really get them to dream with a card trick, with coin magic, or even a piece of stage magic?"
When I started doing magic as a kid, my parents had no problem.
Demonic figures and occult themes have disappeared from modern magic.
I'm really trying hard not to do anything that has been done before. So knowing everything I can about the legacy of magic challenges my team and I to invent new illusions.
Magic has been something I've been really good at since I was really young. The ability has always come easy to me, I'm not sure why.
As I did more of that, I realized, "Well, maybe I should do more magic."
There was a guy named Ed Mishell. He was this grandfatherly guy who did all the illustrations for the catalogs and reviewed magic effects for the magic magazines, so all of the magic dealers would send him magic effects for free-it was a great deal. His basement was full of this stuff. He took me under his wing, and he would sneak me into the Society of American Magicians meetings in New York. It's the world's oldest magic organization.
I was teaching magic at NYU when I was 16.
I find revealing the secrets of magic quite reprehensible.
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.
What I've tried to do in my stage magic is to take a trick and give it an emotional hook.
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