Words matter. These are the best Ricky Jay Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I know absolutely nothing about the 20th Century.
Unlike other Jewish families, we didn’t go out for Chinese food on Sundays, but we spent our time in a world of baking powder biscuits and the best shrimp cocktails that ever were.
I’ve been really lucky in terms of film projects with people, terrific actors and also writers and directors that I really respect.
I love amazing people. I love dazzling them. That’s why I think performing magic is one of the greatest things a person can do.
I think the toughest thing about being an actor in a film is to be with a director who doesn’t know what they want. And that can be really, really frustrating.
I do think deception… There’s something kind of odd about tricking people for a living, but ultimately, it’s a remarkably honest profession, when you think about it. If you violate that code, and you say you’re not using camera tricks, and then you do, I actually think that’s a kind of serious moral issue.
Magicians from the nineteenth century threw cards distances, but I think I’m the first one who made a thing about using them as weapons.
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.
I’m much more interested in lesser-known eccentrics and characters and performers. Like Matthew Buchinger, who was born in Germany in 1674, had no arms or legs and yet did magic, and had 14 kids, and made the most extraordinary calligraphy.
In the winters, I enrolled in the hotel management program at Cornell University. I naively thought that I knew something about sleight-of-hand, entertainment and food, and that would be all I needed.
I never talk much about my family, but my grandfather was friendly with these guys, with magicians and ventriloquists on the highest levels, and I was just… interested.
I think a lot of people just assumed I came to L.A. to do more television and get into show business.
For me, the most exciting thing is to create good magic that’s entertaining for an audience, and it would be lovely if a magician was fooled as well.
I’m probably the only kid in history whose parents made him stop taking music lessons. They made me stop studying the accordion.
I certainly was performing before my writing was published, because I was performing when I was very young. And the thing is I’m very comfortable on stage, so a large portion of my act did come from ad-libs.
Dai Vernon, the greatest sleight of hand figure in the history of the art, rarely performed. But he invented magic and had an enormous influence on the whole range of sleight of hand. And so often, the magic he was doing was to fool other magicians.
The pain is bad magicians ripping off good ones, doing magic badly, and making a mockery of the art.
For the most part, magic secrets are available on a level that’s overwhelming and frightening, and they are very accessible if you do the tiniest bit of digging. But, that said, there’s a certain group of individuals, in which I am included, who are very tight about secrets and don’t share them with anyone.
That’s one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I’m very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.
