Copywriting probably did make me a commercial writer. Nobody wants to read advertising copy, so you have to keep it punchy; you almost have trick them into reading it. You have to make every sentence work.

A common pickpocket trick is for the operator to carry a shawl or overcoat carelessly over the left arm, and to take a seat on the right side of the person they intend to rob in a streetcar or other vehicle.

The trick in foraging for a tooth lost in coffee grounds is not to be misled by the clumps. The only way to be sure is to rub each clump between your thumb and index finger, which makes a mess of your hands.

Music is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life. There's not some trick involved with it. It's pure and it's real. It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things.

Maybe by his second year in Hogwarts, Harry Potter will learn the trick to making a movie this good, but don't bet on it. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is one of the best films of the year.

Entrepreneurs have the flexibility and the ability to do things that large companies simply cannot. Could a large company pull off a trick like Amyris, going from anti-malaria medicine to next-generation fuel?

Stanley Cup hockey comes around every year, when games start to count in multiples of best-of-seven series, and the players seem to put more attention into every pass, every check, every annoying little trick.

The trick with computers I think, is to approach old and new things with the same reverence as you would like your favourite chair and not be seduced by the constant innovation otherwise you never do anything.

One thing you learn doing magic tricks for a living is how close every performance of every magic trick is to disaster. There are no robust magic tricks. They're all hanging from a thread - sometimes literally.

Dictators have an old trick to assess the strength of their opposition: they say something patently untrue, and then look to see who mindlessly repeats it. Those who do, they recognise as their true supporters.

What's the trick to writing a good bad guy? Well, for me, it's always been the idea that you pit yourself against authority, you know? I think that's what it takes - and then you can write villainous characters.

Apart from hard work and being in the right projects, you need to re-invent yourself. I'd be bored doing the same thing over and over, and the audience wouldn't like it, too. The trick is to break that monotony.

The goal is to really blur the line. Can you perform a magic trick in a way that someone doesn't think it's a magic trick but is something amazing they haven't seen before? Then they have to wrestle with reality.

A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.

I made it real clear to the business community - if your plan for innovation is to trick people, is to fool them, is not to tell them the truth about the price, then you're right: I'm going to be right in the way.

The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!

For me, I live for performing live because people look at magicians on television, and they always wonder, 'Is it a camera trick?' 'Is it a stooge?' whereas, live, they know there's no set-ups; there's no stooges.

If you set the attractiveness bar really low, people have to compliment you on your looks when they meet you in person. I'm pretty much a genius. I'm actually applying to work at the Genius Bar based on this trick.

I learned from my community how to shoot a gun, how to shoot it well. I learned how to make a damn good biscuit recipe. The trick, by the way, is frozen butter, not warm butter. But I didn't learn how to get ahead.

We've gone from the image of India as land of fakirs lying on beds of nails, and snake charmers with the Indian rope trick, to the image of India as a land of mathematical geniuses, computer wizards, software gurus.

The healthcare bill not only is a monstrosity in terms of growing the government and cutting out the private sector, the way it was passed was sleazy. Every old Washington trick was used to pass the healthcare bill.

When you play on a team, you learn that there will always be five guys you like, a bunch of guys who are OK, and five you despise. The trick to getting along in any system is not to worry about the five you despise.

That became a big time in comic books because it's when people were starting to break out into independent stuff, the market was getting choked with speculators and everybody was trying to do their own trick covers.

When you're an adult, when times are good, entire years go by in what feels like the space of one season. But the worst trick time plays on you is just how slowly the worst times in your life take you to live through.

The trick is the paradox - turning your story inside out. Now if it is something that appears to be of total normality and then suddenly turns inside out and is a different thing all together then that's fun to write.

I'm not by nature a terribly intuitive person; I need to build a situation in which I will behave more intuitively, and that has really changed the life of my work - I found a way to trick myself into being intuitive.

As a young actor, I played a lot of 'exotic' parts and was stuck with the tag 'sultry.' I had to refuse such parts if I were ever to play anything else. It did the trick, but my agent feared it made me harder to cast.

If God had made a perfect world, it would be a magic trick, not creation, with no meaning or place for us to learn and create. Mankind is not yet ready for a perfect world. We do not know how to appreciate perfection.

In a small powder room, the inclination is to go with a light wall color. My trick is to do the opposite - such as a patterned wallpaper or a deep color on the walls. It's more interesting and makes a design statement.

I love getting things done. That's why I spend several hours a day reading productivity articles. And when the day is done, I bookmark the ones I didn't get to for later. I learned that trick in a productivity article.

There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups... but they're coming for ya. It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.

Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent.

I always have lipstick, and use the same lipstick for my cheeks as blush, so that it looks very natural. It's a good trick I learned from my mother. I like NYX or MAC because they have a lot of pigment and they're matte.

The trick of Afrobeats is it doesn't just move your upper body, it moves your hips as well, and I think that's what people have been missing in popular music for a while. I think that's what people need around the world.

The size thing is not some gimmick or attention-getting trick but a genuine undercurrent of the work. Frank Gehry for instance likes to imagine his buildings as sculptures. I like to imagine my sculptures as architectural.

I am fortunate that I get sent scripts and get to meet people I would never have met had I not done 'Harry Potter.' But I feel I had to come out of that show and prove that I am not a one trick pony and can do other stuff.

Catfish's mild taste adapts well to a wide array of flavors, especially strong assertive ones, which is why you used to see it 'blackened' Cajun style on so many restaurant menus - a trick which soon became a tired cliche.

'Bad Blood' tells the story of Trick, a teenage slacker on the losing side of a fight with cancer. When he's attacked by a vampire, he figures it's game over. Except that the chemo drugs in Trick's blood poison the vampire.

I feel like it's always important to curl your eyelashes. I always do when I wake up and you know you look tired, when you curl eyelashes and put mascara it makes such a huge difference, so that's the trick that I always use.

Capra is an old-time movie craftsman, the master of every trick in the bag, and in many ways he is more at home with the medium than any other Hollywood director. But all of his details give the impression of contrived effect.

When you have to play a character that seems to be a relatively decent person and seems to be like yourself, I think the trick in that kind of character, so that you don't become a cliche, is to find where their weaknesses are.

I liked the idea of having actual magic performed as stage magic, so you could assume that it was just a trick, that something is all smoke and mirrors, but there's that, like, feeling at the back of your mind: What if it's not?

Every song you write you think is the last one you're going to manage. You put everything you've got into the song, and you've twisted it and pulled at it and dug in and found a way to complete it. To get another one is the trick.

I never worry about people not taking my work seriously as a result of the humor. In the end, the comic's best trick is the illusion that comedy is effortless. That people imagine what he's doing is easy is an occupational hazard.

I'm not a believer that you have to write every day. If I felt industrious, I'd spend ten hours a week writing. The writing is going on all the time in my head; the trick is to capture it. Showers are great. Traffic jams are great.

Hindu nationalist outfits like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh perpetuate a false notion of the 'love jihad' - the false idea that young Muslim men are making Hindu girls fall in love with them to trick them into converting to Islam.

A lot of the people in San Francisco think of themselves as healers - not just as people delivering this base service, but giving their clients spiritual help. It's almost like being an actor, playing a different part for each trick.

I think a lot of people in their average day actually imagine two sides of a conversation at one point or another. I think that the mental trick of holding two sides of a conversation in your head is actually something that we all do.

For whatever reason, we relate to anything godlike with an English accent. The English are very proud of that. And with anything Roman or gladiators, they have an English accent. For an audience, it is an easy trick to hook people in.

Narrative has been part of human consciousness for a long time. And if it has played a part in all those thousands of years, it will know a trick or two. It will be wise. It will be mischievous. It will be helpful. It will be generous.

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