Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I never thought about doing a sequel when I was actually writing 'The Magicians.' I only ever considered it a standalone.
If I don't fool you, I'm not doing my job as a magician. If I make you feel foolish, I'm not doing my job as a human being.
When I was in college, being a magician was not the classiest thing to be. It was like being a folk singer before Bob Dylan.
I was damn lucky to choose this profession. I had no idea when I started out that I was really an illusionist and a magician.
The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
My door is open 24 hours. We can discuss things - I don't think I'm a magician or the only guy who knows anything about football.
In the middle of my third Hollywood picture The Magician, the earthquake hit Hollywood. Not the real earthquake. Just the talkies.
One must first become a magician before one he can become a Kabbalist. As a Kabbalist, one works differently and more advantageously.
Magick comes in many forms, and there are many covert master magicians who are so covert that they don't even know they are magicians.
When you work with David Lynch, you never know where he's going next and that's exciting. He's like a magician pulling out new tricks.
Like an audience entertained by a magician, we allow ourselves to be deceived by those with a stake in persuading us to ignore reality.
I think people know Steve Jobs the showman. I think people know the guy who stood up and gave the keynotes. The magician. The salesman.
Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.
I'd go to Coney Island to hang out, and I saw a magician doing a rope trick on the boardwalk. I was fascinated. I guess that's how it started.
Working with Michael Jackson was awesome. He was an incredible entertainer, dancer, singer, magician, everything, and he was really sweet, too.
It used to frustrate me when I'd get celebrities on my shows and I had to meet them as this ludicrous magician character rather than as myself.
I was a magician's assistant and had to go in the box that they put the swords through, and there's no trick to it. You literally have to dodge the swords.
The Vatican is like a huge kind of magician's club. The more you look into it the more awful it becomes. And they're laughing at us. That's when I get angry.
There's always going to be comparisons, and that's unavoidable. There are people out there who feel I hit my peak with Magician and have gone downhill since.
If I wrote a musical it wouldn't be about me. Although I do some magic, so it would probably be about a magician who appeared and re-appeared all over the place.
David Blaine, I think, was the first TV magician to really turn the camera around and make it about the spectator's experience. That's really what magic is all about.
Also, it's risky to try to duplicate earlier success. Magician had a certain charm to it, mostly due to my choice of lead characters, that I would be hard put to duplicate.
There's something a bit embarrassing about saying you're a magician. It immediately suggests all these horrendous cliches, let alone that you're a grown-up doing a child's job.
One time, this guy was bothering my mother, and me and my brothers had a stern talking with the guy and a little bit of physicality with him. So he disappeared. But I'm not a magician.
I never quite know how to describe what I do. I normally just say, 'Oh, I'm a magician', which probably puts fairly naff ideas in people's minds but is pleasantly conversation-stopping.
My best friend in medical school was a magician. And we were shown an X-ray of a sword-swallower, and I tried it and failed. Then I got a sword-swallower as a patient, and he taught me.
I remember in the circus learning that the clown was the prince, the high prince. I always thought that the high prince was the lion or the magician, but the clown is the most important.
I am such a do-goody, people-pleasing kid - or I was - I don't think I've ever been fired, not even from an ice cream shop, magician for kids' parties, not even in my early jobs in radio.
I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself.
Del Potro is one of these miracle men he can come up with these matches where you least expect it and he pulls something out of the bag. I have no idea what it is but he becomes a magician.
If a magician makes a mistake, it's sometimes forgiven by the audience. If a gambling cheat makes a mistake, they will almost certainly lose their lives - and probably in a horrible manner.
I'm rereading Jenny Offill's 'Dept. of Speculation.' I love it, and she's just a magician. Line by line and paragraph by paragraph, it's mesmerizing and so intricately plotted and so nimble.
It took me six years to get close to Picasso. I learnt a lot from him, and he was an absolute genius. He almost became my grandfather at the time. It was like he was a magician or something.
Watching foreign affairs is sometimes like watching a magician; the eye is drawn to the hand performing the dramatic flourishes, leaving the other hand - the one doing the important job - unnoticed.
I just wanted to be in show business. I didn't care if I was going to be an actor or a magician or what. Comedy was a point of the least resistance, really. And on the simplest level, I loved comedy.
'The Black Magician Trilogy' was about a conflict between countries and was very limited and almost claustrophobic in its range of settings, while 'The Age of the Five' was about a conflict between continents.
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.
Before I was known, I would go on stage and pretend I was other people. Once I pretended I was mentally handicapped. It was really wrong. One time I was a bad magician. And one time I pretended I was a Christian comic.
I think several generations of my family had novels in the drawer. You know the montage in 'The Royal Tenenbaums' where each character has produced some sort of minor work? It was like having a magician in the household.
Alan Funt was the first hidden-camera magician. It was the playful nature of the way he worked that really inspired me. A lot of prank shows and hidden-camera shows can be a little mean-spirited. Funt was never like that.
I'm no wizard, and I don't like being thought of in that light at all. I think of a wizard as being some sort of magician or something, doing something on the sly or something, and I don't want to be thought of in that way.
Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?
I'm a big Penn & Teller fan. But I myself was never very good; I was a teenage magician who performed at kids' parties. I can still perform a vanish, credibly, and I still, in special circumstances, will make a balloon animal.
Being from a small town my parents wanted me to become an IAS officer but being an actor I lived the life of everyone. I've been a cop, a hardliner politician, a magician, a watchman, a don, a smuggler, an officer all in one life!
Being a magician taught me how powerful the element of surprise can be. In each book, I've tried to work that in - an unexpected twist in a story that reveals an insight, a counter intuitive study that turns your beliefs upside-down.
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.
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.'
Once people enjoy what I do, I don't mind if they call me a magician or an illusionist or a hypnotist, entertainer, comedian, whatever people want to call me. I'm comfortable with all of the above, so I don't really mind at all what people want to call me.
When you talk to an author - to any artist, really - you learn something about how they do what they do. I've never come away from that kind of experience feeling disillusioned, as if the magician had explained his tricks. I always find a greater appreciation for the form.
I did a lot of magic shows growing up. My dad is a graphic designer so he helped me brand myself and create a logo. So I was just rollin' with the magician crowd for a while. But I was really young, 10 to 13, doing table magic and balloon animals at this Italian restaurant.