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.
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.
I fell in love with magic acts and bridged into that.
There were really a bunch of old, old magic hobbyists at the time, some of them who actually had known [Harry] Houdini. You had to be 14 to go to these meetings, and he snuck me in at 12. It was glorious.
I was published in Tarbell Course in Magic when I was 12.
I have always been interested in pushing magic forward.
It's really hard to think of one kind of magic as a favorite. I've been really fortunate in that I've been able to perform such a diverse range of things.
You can feel better about yourself in a very short period of time depending on the kind of magic that you are doing.
For me, I was watching Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Orson Welles, Victor Fleming movies, and I said, "I want to tell stories like that. I want to move people like that. But I'm good at magic, so what am I going to do?" So I started using magic for the right reasons - to get the girl.
Pippin had an opening number called "Magic to Do," and Jules Fisher, the brilliant lighting designer lit it. Tony Walton did all of the sets. As a kid I thought, "Wow, I'm seeing onstage what a MGM musical would look like live." It was that good, and it was directed by Bob Fosse.
I invented magic stuff; it came very easily. Now, I sucked at everything else, but I was good at magic as a kid.
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