Like all sciences, chemistry is marked by magic moments. For someone fortunate enough to live such a moment, it is an instant of intense emotion: an immense field of investigation suddenly opens up before you.
You can tell if there’s magic in something. When you start it, you want to finish it and you want it to be perfect. If you’re not inspired, and you’re working hard to pull inspiration from somewhere and make a song something it’s not, then it’s very contrived, and I don’t like to write music that’s contrived.
There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.
When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy.
What I’m doing is art – it’s low-brow art but there’s a magic in that.
There’s nothing magic about working with franchisees. What you have to do is help them improve their business.
School librarians play such an enormous role in bringing children to books they are going to enjoy. It’s a magic alchemy when that works.
The skills that we have are the actual magic skills – not the performing skills. We have to separate those. But the actual skills that make the tricks work, we don’t get to use again.
This is magic we’re talking about. It’s supposed to go places science can’t, defy logic, wink at technology, fill us all with the sensawunda that comes of gazing upon a fictional world and seeing something truly different from our own.
Magic is my paint.
When I was nine, my great grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper.
I’ve always been interested in moments of disbelief… I don’t know if they possess any magic, but they do have something.
I’m a storyteller, and I have really good material to work with: I’ve been studying magic and the occult since about 1983.
Magic is an art form where you lie and tell people you are lying.
Movies are like magic tricks.
First of all, writing at best – certainly fiction writing – more and more I think is magic.
Recently, I’ve really responded to books that bring the magic of childhood back to us as adults.
The real magic is in making the intangible idea, the creative impulse, manifest and live in our reality.
I’ll hear people say every so often that having HIV must not be so bad – ‘Just look at Magic and how well he’s doing.’
With ‘Black Rain,’ I spent a lot of time with homicide detectives, and I spent a lot of time with different brokers on ‘Wall Street.’ It helps get the rhythm of the piece and the tone, and how overplayed or underplayed it might be. That’s also the magic of movies: You get to hang out and live these different lives.
Not to say people shouldn’t get rich from art. I adore the alchemy wherein artists who cast a complex spell make rich people give them their money. (Just writing it makes me cackle.) But too many artists have been making money without magic.
I think every fantasy reader secretly believes they know how magic works.
An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.
I don’t know a writer who doesn’t feel some sense of glamour and magic and a complex, wistful sadness emanating from the expats of the twenties in France. Some of the sadness, of course, is that we weren’t there.
We all want to believe in the magic of someone knowing what we’re thinking.
Big dreams create the magic that stir men’s souls to greatness.
Do I believe, for example, that by using magic I could fly? No. How would you get around gravity? Impossible. Do I believe that I might be able to project my consciousness into a very, very vivid simulation of flying? Yeah. Yes, I’ve done that. Yes, that works.
There’s no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.
Roosevelt’s magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Real laughter is spontaneous. Like water from the spring it bubbles forth a creation of mingled action and spontaneity – two magic potions in themselves – the very essence of laughter – the unrestrained emotion within us!
Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.
Like most people in radio – and in magic – I’m not cool. I know people who are hip, and I can feel distance between them and me.
The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.
Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.
I’m not interested in corporate magic or fame.
You know, magic markets don’t appear all the time, so you take advantage of them.
I think the greatest player I’ve ever played against was Magic Johnson. Next, was Larry Bird. Then, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Now, I think that I should have known that he was magic all along. I did know it – but I should have guessed that it would be too much to ask to grow old with and see our children grow up together. So now, he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.
I like celluloid, I like film, I like the way that when a movie is projected it sort of breathes a little in the gate. That’s the magic of it to me.
I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody’s face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.
I think we can really use magic in a way never attempted before to inspire these children, help rally their self-confidence and even help them develop social skills. This is a national effort, not just here in Las Vegas. I know we can give them a true passion.
When you look at C-3PO and Darth Vader and then look at the actors behind them, you can’t really make the connection. It kills the magic.
Not many people know this, but when Yes first started doing club dates back in 1968, ’69, we did a few tracks from ‘The Magic Garden’ album in our set. We just loved the harmonies that the 5th Dimension had as well.
Once I’m on set, the only thing I’m really interested in is being in the room. Being present. And trusting that what I’ve done is sufficient, and I’m also trusting that I’ve also left room for magic.
If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.
I’ve always been a huge fantasy fan. I was always interested in fairy tales and anything with magic or dragons… I was always drawn to those types of stories.
The magic of GoPro is that we are enabling the world to communicate in this new way, to express themselves in a new way, and it’s snowballing.
The Internet has always been, and always will be, a magic box.
The fun little proofs that you can do with algebra – they are sort of like crowd pleasers in a way. Like, the .9 repeating equaling one. It doesn’t take a lot of algebra to prove that, and it’s really fun. It kind of wows people. It’s like they’re watching magic happen right before their eyes.
In 1979, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird entered the league. I remember that. Soon after this, the story began to be repeated ad nauseam: the NBA, a tottering mess in the seventies, was saved in the eighties by these two.
Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics.
There’s now, for the first time, a huge gulf between the artefacts of our everyday life and what even a single expert, let alone the average child, can comprehend. The gadgets that now pervade young people’s lives, iPhones and suchlike, are baffling ‘black boxes’ – pure magic to most people.
One man’s ‘magic’ is another man’s engineering. ‘Supernatural’ is a null word.
I was searching for a way to demonstrate 3D movement to my students and one day found myself staring into the River Danube, looking at how the water moved around the pebbles. This became the inspiration for the cube’s twisting mechanism. The fact that it can do this without falling apart is part of its magic.
The truly great books are always novels: ‘Anna Karenina,’ ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ ‘The Magic Mountain.’ Just as with ‘Shahnameh,’ I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.
We’re all Americans trying to compete. Magic was competing for his team and Larry for his team.
