Whenever I read a quote that speaks to me, I put it into a file that I keep in a text editor app that syncs to the cloud. I’ve been doing this for many years so you can imagine it’s a long list of mostly random quotes.
Here’s a few recent on the performance of magic:
“One doesn’t become a better magician because one knows a better trick or more tricks than someone else, but because one has understood and interpreted a trick better than someone else.”
Roberto Giobbi
“If you take a card trick with three sleights, and replace the first sleight with a subtlety, you get a better trick. If you eliminate the second sleight, you get a small miracle. But if you eliminate the last sleight, then you usually end up with a mathematical atrocity.”
Dr. Jacob Daily
“Magic is no different from many activities requiring movement of oneself and of things in one’s environment. Force is a vital element in these things, and when a magician pretends to make some action that requires the simulation of force…or its concealment…doing these things in a believable and deceptive manner can be very challenging. It is unfortunate that, given the difficulty of these tasks and their importance to sustaining an illusion, many magicians are oblivious to the problem of force itself.”
Tommy Wonder
“If you put, let’s say, a coin into your hand, close your hand, snap your fingers, open it, and the coin is gone, there’s not much of an impact to that. And the reason for that is that the action seems arbitrary. That there doesn’t seem to be a cause that makes that event happen. If you put the same coin in your hand, close your hand, and even do just this– even just, say, take out a match. Light the match, pass it around your hand, and act with a sudden jolt as though something has happened inside your head where the coin melted away, and you’ve been burnt. And you open your hand and there’s no coin now. That level of acting, that level of causality that suggests that somehow the fire of a match could make a coin melt away, suddenly adds a dimension to it that I think is pretty crucial.”
Teller
