Teller quotes:
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Generally, magicians don't know what to say, so they say stupid and redundant crap like, 'Here I am holding a red ball.'
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The Boy Scouts of America is no longer entirely what people think it is. Essentially, it has been hijacked by religious conservatives.
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Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.
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In real life, the most important decision you ever make is, where does reality leave off and make-believe begin? If you make a mistake about that, you're dead. You know, you're out on the street corner. You think there's no bus coming. You step out, you're dead.
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As a kid, I was a Hitchcock lover; I cared about the dark side of things.
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The silent thing onstage allows for a kind of intimacy that no conversation can have. If I just shut up, we're forced to look at each other and really confront that moment.
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Nobody who is a Penn & Teller fan thinks of us first and foremost as magicians, but as a comedy team.
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Onstage, I find absolutely nothing but exhilaration in not talking.
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If you read Shakespeare's stage directions, all the gore and violence is right in there.
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Magic's about understanding - and then manipulating - how viewers digest the sensory information.
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Magic is an art form where you lie and tell people you are lying.
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Given my absolute druthers, I would certainly like to see that every part of my body is used for spare parts for science.
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When a magician lets you notice something on your own, his lie becomes impenetrable.
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The place we want to explore unpleasantness in the real world is in art.
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Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.
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Indian street magic tends to be very gory, blood and guts. One trick is for a magician to take a knife and appear to cut his kid's head almost off. The magician then says to the crowd, 'Well I can continue to cut off my son's head or you can all give me some money.' Then he wanders around and takes 10 rupees from everyone and restores his son.
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If you do something that you're proud of, that someone else understands, that is a thing of beauty that wasn't there before - you can't beat that.
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Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology. If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful.
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If there isn't at least the threat of violence in art, it tends to be kind of tiresome.
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People come up to me on the street and make some little joke - like they'll say, 'Excuse me, sir, what time is it?' And I'll say, you know, '5:15,' and they'll say, 'Hey! Made you talk!' And that's merely a way of saying, 'I know your work and I like you.'
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I'm a lazy sod.
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Neuroscientists are novices at deception.
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Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.
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I'm more apt to cry at something beautiful than at something sad.