Top 55 Magician Quotes

Before I was known, I would go on stage and pretend I was other people. Once I pretended I was mentally handicapped. It was really wrong. One time I was a bad magician. And one time I pretended I was a Christian comic.

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.

It took me six years to get close to Picasso. I learnt a lot from him, and he was an absolute genius. He almost became my grandfather at the time. It was like he was a magician or something.

Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?

I never quite know how to describe what I do. I normally just say, ‘Oh, I’m a magician’, which probably puts fairly naff ideas in people’s minds but is pleasantly conversation-stopping.

I did a lot of magic shows growing up. My dad is a graphic designer so he helped me brand myself and create a logo. So I was just rollin’ with the magician crowd for a while. But I was really young, 10 to 13, doing table magic and balloon animals at this Italian restaurant.

My mother‘s dad dropped out of the eighth grade to work. He had to. By the time he was 30, he was a master electrician, plumber, carpenter, mason, mechanic. That guy was, to me, a magician. Anything that was broken, he could fix. Anybody anywhere in our community knew that if there was a problem, Carl was there to fix it.

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.

Being from a small town my parents wanted me to become an IAS officer but being an actor I lived the life of everyone. I’ve been a cop, a hardliner politician, a magician, a watchman, a don, a smuggler, an officer all in one life!

Drew was a director, and I’m a magician.

My best friend in medical school was a magician. And we were shown an X-ray of a sword-swallower, and I tried it and failed. Then I got a sword-swallower as a patient, and he taught me.

‘The Black Magician Trilogy‘ was about a conflict between countries and was very limited and almost claustrophobic in its range of settings, while ‘The Age of the Five’ was about a conflict between continents.

It used to frustrate me when I’d get celebrities on my shows and I had to meet them as this ludicrous magician character rather than as myself.

I love a quick little magician gag.

Magic, whether it’s mind magic or conjuring, is about the cheapest and quickest way of impressing people, and I think if you don’t grow out of that as a magician then it shows, and people get a bit sick of that after a while, because it starts to feel like posturing. So I grew out of it.

I don’t want to be ‘the magician’; I want to be an innocent bystander along with the magical moment.

There’s something a bit embarrassing about saying you’re a magician. It immediately suggests all these horrendous cliches, let alone that you’re a grown-up doing a child‘s job.

I don’t put a girl in a box and clap my hands three times, and she‘s gone. I get in the box, and I vanish, and I reappear at the other side of the stage. That way, people don’t think, ‘That’s a great illusion.’ They think, ‘Doug’s a great magician.’

I was damn lucky to choose this profession. I had no idea when I started out that I was really an illusionist and a magician.

I am such a do-goody, people-pleasing kid – or I was – I don’t think I’ve ever been fired, not even from an ice cream shop, magician for kids‘ parties, not even in my early jobs in radio.

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 a magician. A lot of people don’t know that I’ve won awards. I used to do big stage shows.

Because ‘Gob’ was a terrible magician, he was always, in great comedic moments, messing up his magic act. We used to have magicians come in to work on these tricks to actually get them wrong. But they still had to work. We had to bring magicians on to make magic not work.

I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself.

When the audience enjoys your performance, you feel like a magician who is doing magic. It’s a great feeling!

Labor is the fabled magician’s wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.

I never wanted to be a magician. I never wanted to be a comedian. I never wanted to be onstage.

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.

And the nature of magic is all in the person‘s experience. Whether the magician is using a highly complex sleight of hand or he’s just got two cards that are the same, it doesn’t matter: it’s how it’s sold and how magical it is for the person that matters.

People have expectations of me but I’m not a magician.

In the middle of my third Hollywood picture The Magician, the earthquake hit Hollywood. Not the real earthquake. Just the talkies.

My interest was magic, believe it or not. I became an amateur magician and did something like 400 magic shows through my teen years.

I’d go to Coney Island to hang out, and I saw a magician doing a rope trick on the boardwalk. I was fascinated. I guess that’s how it started.

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.

Alan Funt was the first hidden-camera magician. It was the playful nature of the way he worked that really inspired me. A lot of prank shows and hidden-camera shows can be a little mean-spirited. Funt was never like that.

When a magician lets you notice something on your own, his lie becomes impenetrable.

Del Potro is one of these miracle men he can come up with these matches where you least expect it and he pulls something out of the bag. I have no idea what it is but he becomes a magician.

When you work with David Lynch, you never know where he’s going next and that’s exciting. He’s like a magician pulling out new tricks.

David Blaine, I think, was the first TV magician to really turn the camera around and make it about the spectator‘s experience. That’s really what magic is all about.

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.

‘The Magician’s Apprentice‘ was about someone from the low end of society manifesting magical power and how that completely messes up the balance of the whole system.

As a magician or anyone fascinated by magic, the Houdini story is a really impressive one.

Once people enjoy what I do, I don’t mind if they call me a magician or an illusionist or a hypnotist, entertainer, comedian, whatever people want to call me. I’m comfortable with all of the above, so I don’t really mind at all what people want to call me.

I’m rereading Jenny Offill’s ‘Dept. of Speculation.’ I love it, and she’s just a magician. Line by line and paragraph by paragraph, it’s mesmerizing and so intricately plotted and so nimble.

I beg you I no magician. I can’t just wave a magic wand.

When you talk to an author – to any artist, really – you learn something about how they do what they do. I’ve never come away from that kind of experience feeling disillusioned, as if the magician had explained his tricks. I always find a greater appreciation for the form.

My door is open 24 hours. We can discuss things – I don’t think I’m a magician or the only guy who knows anything about football.

I was considered a comedy magician. And – how do I put this without sounding egotistical? – it didn’t take me long to realize that comedy magicians usually couldn’t do comedy or magic.

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

That’s how I lived for 10 years in Bristol after graduating. I just stayed in my student flat and paid very little rent. It was lovely, and part of me still misses that very lazy lifestyle. I was known as the magician on the street, and I used to dress a little eccentrically in a cloak.

I think several generations of my family had novels in the drawer. You know the montage in ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ where each character has produced some sort of minor work? It was like having a magician in the household.

I’m no wizard, and I don’t like being thought of in that light at all. I think of a wizard as being some sort of magician or something, doing something on the sly or something, and I don’t want to be thought of in that way.

When you’re learning how to do magic, the first rule is ‘never reveal a secret.’ In a way, by telling someone I’m a magician, it kind of gives away the best secret of all… How interesting to take the magician out of the equation of a magic show.

I think people know Steve Jobs the showman. I think people know the guy who stood up and gave the keynotes. The magician. The salesman.

Watching foreign affairs is sometimes like watching a magician; the eye is drawn to the hand performing the dramatic flourishes, leaving the other hand – the one doing the important job – unnoticed.