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.
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.
Magic and new technology have always walked hand in hand - even back in the days of Robert Houdin.
Magic came very easy for me when I was a kid. When I was 8 years old I started doing it, and by the time I was 12, I was already published in magic books
Normally, I do magic on the stage. But I can make magic credible and resonate through a TV screen.
You have to learn certain skills to present magic.
There was a place in New York called Tannen's Magic. It still exists. But back in the day, it was really fantastic. You'd go into the old Wurlitzer Building, take the elevator to the 13th floor, which was labeled 14, because of bad luck, the elevator would open, and you'd be in heaven. It was all of these guys doing magic stuff with props. It's kind of gone now, that experience, the brick-and-mortar magic shop, but you really felt like you'd landed in the most amazing place in the world.
I was 16 at the time, and I came backstage and started hanging out with them. I said, "Well, maybe you can 'vanish' the silk this way." The opening was a black stage while the "Magic to Do" song started playing. All you saw were hands, lit by Jules Fisher, and then Ben Vereen would appear beyond the hands, and at the end of the scene he would vanish a silk. The spotlight would hit a red spot on the floor where you'd see the silk on the floor. He'd pull the silk out of the floor and it became the entire set coming out of the floor.
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