I intend to do the Penn & Teller show until they pry my cheesy magic wand from my cold dead fingers.
I’m really happy with all the art that was inspired by religion, and I think I’d be tickled to little tiny pieces if art in the future was inspired by other things.
I don’t want people who are in poverty, in pain, or suffering, to suffer because it’s for their own good and they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I want to help them. I want us all to help them.
My mom, if you asked her if she was interested in whether or not people gambled, would say no.
Tommy Smothers is a hero of mine.
In my run-ins with Christians… I find that they really are good moral people. And we overlap on everything, and they don’t seem to be the kind of people that are waiting to hear voices to tell them what to do.
I’m not misunderstood. I am brash. I make my living being brash.
I like to read in the dark. I like to go into the bathtub, turn out all the lights, and in the dark, read my books.
If I go out to dinner with you and you order wine, I leave. I won’t be around drugs and alcohol at all.
Religion is often just tribalism: pride in a group one was born into, a group that is often believed to have ‘God’ on its side.
Don’t waste too much time wishing, hoping, and being envious; it’ll make you bugnutty.
Penn & Teller stopped doing practical jokes, and the reason is we got much too good at it.
We need a president who realizes that there’s no government business in show business.
The highest ideals are human intelligence, creativity and love. Respect these above all.
If I were trying to avoid embarrassment, I wouldn’t have stumbled my way through ‘Dancing with the Stars.’
I do believe that a belief in God is crazy, but that doesn’t mean that the people who believe in it are crazy. Those are two different things. Ideas can be stupid and crazy, and the people who hold those ideas are not necessarily stupid and crazy.
I’m a big fan of gospel music, and you cannot be a fan of rock and roll, you cannot be a fan of country western music, and you can’t really be a fan of jazz without listening to a lot of music that’s religious.
Asking someone else to do something immoral is immoral.
The reason I’m an I.B.M.-type guy today is that I really needed a laptop back in 1986, and I just couldn’t wait for the Powerbook.
My hair is way, way long. I’ve hitchhiked across the country a zillion times. I’ve ridden in every car. I was never a hippie. It takes more than long hair.
I think people under age 55 come to Vegas with a certain sense of irony.
The definition of a stupid thing is something that if you do everything right, you still get hurt. Fire-eating and love are stupid things.
I had e-mail in 1984! I had an e-mail address then, which means that all you could write to was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. There were three of us, writing to each other.
I think one of the things about Donald Trump that’s interesting is he lives in a rarified atmosphere where it’s possible that he doesn’t get enough feedback, enough people rolling their eyes at him. It’s a danger more in show business than it is with wealth.
If you want to turn out an atheist child, unconditional love constantly is a good way to do it.
Every poker player is smarter than me.
For better or worse, in the 21st century, reality shows are the variety show.
You can’t allow people freedom and then change your mind when the things don’t go your way.
Everybody wants clean, safe energy. Some people think nuclear is the way to go. Some people think coal is the way to go. Some people think wind is the way to go. And there’s always balances on that.
The fact is that violence gives you a rush.
I will forever stick up for Catholics and Christians in general. With a small number of very horrible exceptions, they do play by the rules.
If I had to imagine omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent power in the universe that chose to make my mother suffer, I don’t know how I would make that make sense in the universe.
Poker has the feeling of a sport, but you don’t have to do push-ups.
TV networks are dying. The death throes of religion give us jihads. The death throes of television give us reality shows.
The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people.
Teller and I worked Renaissance Festivals and street performing – actually more real, no kidding around, Philadelphia street performing than we did Renaissance Festivals.
The purpose of art is to collide the intellectual and visceral together at the highest speed possible.
I’m a big fan of huge populations of people, so you’d think with 300 million people in the country, you don’t even have to please 1% to be phenomenally successful.
In my private life, I’m not around any drugs or alcohol.
I think it’s pretty cruel to give a kid a name that others are going to have. I think it’s very important to have a unique name within any group you’re likely to be in.
I’m always surprised when the corporate world does stupid things, because they’re often not very stupid in hindsight.
I’m totally clean and sober my whole life.
You have to be careful as a libertarian because you can sound very Republican.
There are performers who have built their whole career doing magic on TV and can’t really perform live at all – don’t really have jobs and skills.
I hate that not everything ever written is on iBooks. Man, I hate paper.
When you’re watching Psycho, there’ s that moment when you have a visceral reaction to watching someone being stabbed. And then you have the intellectual revelation that you’re not, and that’s where the celebration comes in.
I love the idea that horror and fear is a celebration of health and life.
Having a Hummer is stupid. It’s stupid to waste that much gas. It’s stupid to waste that much money on gas. It’s stupid to parade your insecurities on public roads. Hummers are stupid-looking.
No one can tell you the rules of ‘Celebrity Apprentice.’ No one. Donald Trump just does what he wants, which is mostly pontificating to people who are sucking up to him, while the network people try to manipulate him into making the highest-rated show they can.
When you tell other people to do stuff they don’t know how to do, they tend to freak out.
It’s only the losers named ‘Dave’ that think having an unusual name is bad, and who cares what they think? They’re named ‘Dave.’
I’m an amazing mama’s boy.
When I was 15, 16, 17 years old, I spent five hours a day juggling, and I probably spent six hours a day seriously listening to music. And if I were 16 now, I would put that time into playing video games.
Poker would have never gotten on TV when we only had three networks.
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