The newly released movie ‘Noah’ features a retelling of the creation story that clearly depicts Darwinian evolution transforming a single-cell organism into a monkey. The movie also seems to show magic in scenes more reminiscent of the occult than of the Bible story.
It’s all magic to me. Country to punk rock, all of it. Chopin to Kurt Cobain. But it always all comes back to punk for me, because that was the last time, punk rock or grunge rock, was the last time that passion ruled the airwaves.
Magic is, in its core, introverted and closed; it’s the most closed community ever, and I want to change all that and make it more open. If we want things to change, we have to be more open-minded.
The magic’s back and we’re in a time tunnel, feeling like when we were in our 20s back in the 1970s.
One of the things that Teller and I are obsessed with, one of the reasons that we’re in magic, is the difference between fantasy and reality.
I remember finding a Houdini book at the library and seeing an image of him chained on the side of a building. He looked so intense and scary, and I couldn’t get that image out of my head. That started building up my love of magic.
The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.
For me, it’s been a treat to interact with authors who were publishing when I was a young reader. Judy Blume once gave me a pep talk at a writing conference. I had a short story featured in the same anthology as Beverly Cleary. Magic.
From the time I was 9 years old, I loved magic. I was an only child, and I think that had a big impact on me. I always had grown-up friends even though I was a little kid. I would take the train from Lido Beach into Manhattan, and I’d hang out in magic shops.
I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living.
I liked the whole process of creating on set. It’s almost like creating magic. The work that the camera guys are doing at the same time, the lighting… all of the people working in their departments to make one thing.
I would love to do a track with Will.I.Am. He’s always creating amazing songs. I mean, to be honest, Chris Brown has always been amazing, so I would hop on there and let him do his thing and create some magic there. As for a producer, I would love to work with J.R. Rotem. He’s my favorite producer out there.
My father made sure that I had lots of levels of education – from ballroom-dancing to painting, commando training, theatre and magic.
The magic of America is that we’re a free and open society with a mixed population. Part of our security is our freedom.
When I was a teenager, what I most wanted to read were fantasy novels. Not Tolkien and Malory, but sword-and-sorcery pulp. I craved glowy blue magic, chainmail bikinis, dragons with unpronounceable names.
To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter’s imagination.
I want to bring magic back to where it started, which is not about the props, and it’s not about me as a magician: it’s about the audience and playing with their minds and playing with their perception of magic and having fun with it.
My interest was magic, believe it or not. I became an amateur magician and did something like 400 magic shows through my teen years.
Acting is a sense of wonder and magic and mystery for me and when life takes me on a new journey, I simply remember the smile my first ballet recital put on my face and I move forward.
Religion is like magic. It is all about tricks.
Magic lies in challenging what seems impossible.
In our quest to tweet, like, and trend, we have forgotten that brands can be built through advertising. Ads can generate big ideas that can never be trumped by tactics. That is the magic of an ad, and that is what is missing from many ads today.
Something magic happens when I get to a club or get on stage.
I love the magic of the studio.
Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.
I think there’s a huge amount of magic on television, which is slightly vapid: there’s no real meaning or message behind it; it is simply a trick.
‘Anthony and the Magic Picture Frame’ tells it like it really was in America’s early space program – the adventure, the risks, and the rewards.
I am richer than Davy Crockett. I can settle back and do what I want to do. And what I want to do is card tricks and magic.
When the audience enjoys your performance, you feel like a magician who is doing magic. It’s a great feeling!
There is magic in my universe, but it’s pretty low magic compared to other fantasies.
There are still some natural forces that everybody understands. Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.
It was funny to run into girls I knew after the movie came out because they would say, ‘I saw you on ‘Magic Mike,’ but there was this look of embarrassment. It was very cute.
A big practice in chaos magic is the use of sigils, which are abstract words or symbols you create and embed with your wishes.
There’s also the tradition of voodoo, the Haitian magic arts, in New Orleans. And because New Orleans is below sea level, when they bury people in New Orleans, it’s mostly above ground. So you have this idea that the spirits are more accessible and can access you more easily because they’re not even buried.
Harry Collins was the first magician I ever saw back in 1965 when I was five years old. He was doing a magic show and I was the volunteer from the audience.
Mozart’s seeming frothiness is just a light touch with very profound material. That’s what I’ve found working on ‘The Magic Flute.’
College is a magic time. Yes, you’re young and fickle, but you want to be part of this college experience… Then you graduate from that. You have your first job, moving to a new city.
You have to learn certain skills to present magic.
I see the world as a magical place. Therefore, it was only natural that magic wafted from my fiction like smoke.
Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.
I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it’s because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph – luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.
Alchametic magic is ‘How do I create something out of nothing purely through manifesting my will through power and light, which is value.’ That’s white magic. That’s alchametic magic.
To me, it’s never about the trick. I don’t care about how something works. I care about how people feel when they watch it. You know, that – that connection – that emotional connection is true magic.
Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.
Everyone making electronic music has the same tool kits and templates. You listen, and you feel like it can be done on an iPad. If everybody knows all the tricks, it’s no more magic.
I started performing when I was 9 or 10, doing magic.
I always wanted to go to the Chavez school but I could never afford it when I was growing up so a lot of my learning came from magic books and watching other magicians. I was also very lucky that I had a couple of really good magic teachers.
A girl must have an indefinable magic, real character, a strong sense of self. Her role is to respond to the brief of a photographer or communicate the vision of a designer – while making whatever she does look utterly effortless and whatever she wears utterly seamless.
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
Neither a success nor by any means a failure, Roku will nevertheless ask public investors for money because they, too, have a right to dream that magic will become reality one day.
I’m very excited to see the wonderful 2-D characters in Poptropica come to life in the form of 3-D toys. When I first held the characters in my hands, it felt like magic. I’m excited for kids to have the same feeling!
A vacation spot out of season always has a very special magic.
Twilight’ has a supernatural reference to it with werewolves and vampires. ‘Harry Potter’ has magic. ‘The Hunger Games’ is about real people put into extreme situations and circumstances.
There’s a lot of magic involved in movies that as a child I really appreciated. So I love bringing my son to set. It reminds me of what I loved doing as a child, and also, as an actor, you have a lot of down time.
I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.
