Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.
Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.
Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.
Magic is an art form where you lie and tell people you are lying.
Indian street magic tends to be very gory, blood and guts. One trick is for a magician to take a knife and appear to cut his kid's head almost off. The magician then says to the crowd, 'Well I can continue to cut off my son's head or you can all give me some money.' Then he wanders around and takes 10 rupees from everyone and restores his son.
When a magician lets you notice something on your own, his lie becomes impenetrable.
In real life, the most important decision you ever make is, where does reality leave off and make-believe begin? If you make a mistake about that, you're dead. You know, you're out on the street corner. You think there's no bus coming. You step out, you're dead.
Magic's about understanding - and then manipulating - how viewers digest the sensory information.
Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology. If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful.
People come up to me on the street and make some little joke - like they'll say, 'Excuse me, sir, what time is it?' And I'll say, you know, '5:15,' and they'll say, 'Hey! Made you talk!' And that's merely a way of saying, 'I know your work and I like you.'
Neuroscientists are novices at deception.
People do not come to a Penn & Teller show to see a magic show. They just don't. They come to see weird stuff that they can see no place else, that will make them laugh and make the little hairs stand up on the backs of their necks.
Nobody who is a Penn & Teller fan thinks of us first and foremost as magicians, but as a comedy team.
The silent thing onstage allows for a kind of intimacy that no conversation can have. If I just shut up, we're forced to look at each other and really confront that moment.
Generally, magicians don't know what to say, so they say stupid and redundant crap like, 'Here I am holding a red ball.'
I always assumed I'd spend my life happily performing in artsy-fartsy little theaters.
People take reality for granted.
Doing beautiful things is its own reward.
I'm more apt to cry at something beautiful than at something sad.
If you do something that you're proud of, that someone else understands, that is a thing of beauty that wasn't there before - you can't beat that.
