I’m very into science-fantasy, that kind of swordfights and magic and technology thing.
When we started in television, there was that magic box in the corner of the room, and ‘Oh my gosh – look what it’s doing!’
I don’t think I should be telling you every 10 minutes what to think. I like to leave the audience alone with the magic. I tend to trust the material, or I don’t do it.
The terrible thing about the Internet and Amazon is that they take the magic and happy chaos out of book shopping. The Internet might give you what you want, but it won’t give you what you need.
It takes these very simple-minded instructions – ‘Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number’ – but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.
Surfing is like golf: You’re always battling, and it keeps knocking you down. There are a lot of wipeouts. But when you stay with it and catch that wave, you really taste it. It’s magic.
Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.
For a long time, I’d work until 10 or 11. When I work, I’m on. I’m ‘Magic.’ I love it, but it takes a lot out of me.
When someone really, truly believes in themselves, magic happens.
You learn pretty fast that there is no magic solution to poverty.
Enjoy the magic of compounding returns. Even modest investments made in one’s early 20s are likely to grow to staggering amounts over the course of an investment lifetime.
But we were really locked in to that kind of format, and as the ’90s wore on, it became for me more solidified, in that sense that there weren’t as many of those magical shows that were just magic all the way through as there had been in earlier years.
People often called us perfectionists, but we were not looking for perfection. We were looking for some kind of magic in the music.
Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is inexplicable.
We don’t have a good legal justification for breaking up the banking system. But if I could wave a magic wand, I’d break up the banking system.
I’ve always loved records, even when I was a kid, my parents would buy me records instead of a lot of the other toys kids got. That’s what I wanted. I’ve been collecting records and DJing my whole life, and I thank my parents for that. They had a big record collection and really imparted the magic of it on me.
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.
The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I’ve never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There’s still magic in the idea, so I’d rather keep it that way than try to be exoteric about it.
There are somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 working magic professionals in the world, and since we debuted our Magic Kit, we have sold over 1 million. So it’s for people who have a strong interest, but be it for one trick or a lifetime, we will be there for them. We will guide them so they don’t waste their money.
They developed a platform for me to put up another 12 years, and that was my ticket to Cooperstown. Those were the best years of my life. It was like magic.
Paul McCartney and The Beatles in general are my idols. And I love Sting. I got to meet Sting. That was really cool. Dustin Hoffman is my favorite actor. Also, I think of Magic Johnson as an idol.
L.A.’s magic has let me see every level of the dream.
Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.
Houdini connected to people on an emotional level so that when he would escape that straight jacket it wasn’t about the straight jacket. It was about people looking at it and escaping poverty. When you have that it’s the truest form of magic.
I don’t think you can say something is or isn’t magic. That’s what was cool about Houdini, because he was a magician who had a magic show, but he was also an escape artist, and they kind of, over time, blended together. They both kind of enhance each other, I think.
I found a ‘lost’ manuscript called the Book of Soyga that had once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I’s court astrologer, John Dee, in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Everybody thought it was the missing key to Dee’s interest in magic. Of course, it wasn’t really lost. It was there, in the catalog.
My products and magic are free, but on the commercial side of what I do, the big tech companies are impressed with somebody like me who can emotionalize a piece of technology.
If you want to be a writer, just write. There’s no magic to it.
Oh, I just tend to believe in things when I’m writing them. For instance, when I was writing ‘Doctor Dee,’ I believed in magic. And when I wrote ‘Hawksmoor’ I believed in psychic geography. But as soon as I type the last full stop, I’m back to being a complete blank again.
Just having the camera, being able to pull back from situations and be an observer, it saved my life… I realised I could find these intimate moments and that people trusted me. That, basically, my camera was magic.
I don’t make the decision about what percentage of good guy or bad guy I play. For some reason, if I put my energy into the bad guy, that scares people. It’s magic.
Magic, like technology, is a tool.
Love can sometimes be magic. But magic can sometimes… just be an illusion.
Weekends are about replenishment and rejuvenation. Time in Wales would definitely be part of my ideal weekend, at my own hotel, set in 72 acres of absolute gorgeousness. I can already feel the air working its magic, with the sea breeze drifting over us.
My fantasy life was very full. Certainly when I was a kid, I probably wanted to be an actor because I wanted to be a princess, or something magical, and get to dress up magically, and have the kind of life that I hadn’t been born into, with magic powers or whatever, and live this wonderful idealised life.
Peacemaking and democratic state-building require blood and magic.
Every book that you pick up takes you a step away from your real world, but if you read a book about magic, it takes you an extra two steps.
Magic provides a way of still having room for possibilities, an unlimited sense of what the world offers. Magic is always there when science is found wanting.
I needed more knowledge in rigging and knotting. I started collecting books on knots and really learning more and more. That’s how it started. And also in magic, of course. With a piece of rope, you can do magic.
Magic Realism is not new. The label’s new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it’s been around as long as literature has been around.
After 40 years of not playing, I admit I’m totally in love with my guitar. It’s a Froggy Bottom acoustic steel string guitar. All I have to do is hit a couple of clean chords and the endorphins are right there. It’s like the top of my head has come off and stardust and magic have fallen in.
My impression, is that prayer is one of the most basic forms of magic. That it’s harnessing the powers of your mind.
Cinema Paradiso, because it reminds me of why I make movies, the magic of movies, the romance of movies.
I’m honestly kind of scared of horror films. My girlfriend always tries to expose them to me. Being in a scary movie and seeing all the fake blood and stuff definitely takes away from the magic and kind of humanizes scary movies to me now, though.
The difference between a score in the 90s and a century is often reflected as the difference between failure and success. It may be illogical, but in cricket, a century has its own magic.
I’m always aiming for some magic in films if I can find a mystical quality either in a song or in a moment or a character’s intention.
There’s magic all around us: Our smartphones are magical, 3-D printers are magical. So I feel that as a magician, if I can pull off something that seems real and convincing enough that I can explain why it’s happening and have people believe it, it really is fascinating. And funny.
In the past, people generally believed they could acquire magic in two ways: through learning the craft, either from another practitioner or from books; or through obtaining magic from a powerful being-think Faust or the classic, demonized witch, both of whom get their mojo from Satan.
I grew up in the ’80s in L.A., so Ice Cube and Magic Johnson are my heroes.
Well, when I was younger, I lied all the time, because once you understand the power of lying, it’s really like magic because you transform reality for people.
There’s plenty to read about keeping your sanity while raising children, but it’s all common-sense stuff about task division and taking breaks and the relentlessly repeated magic of date night with your spouse. What’s missing is some ‘tude.
I love mayonnaise. It’s one of the first lessons I teach my cooking students. Turning eggs and oil into an emulsion – that creamy, satisfying third thing – feels like magic.
