Quotes & Sayings About Performing Magic

If the actions used in performing sleights are visible or even suspected by the onlooker, the whole illusion of magic is destroyed. — Jean Hugard

I love amazing people. I love dazzling them. That's why I think performing magic is one of the greatest things a person can do. — Ricky Jay

Night after night, through years of performing and directing, I've stood in awe of the audience, of its capacity for response. As if by magic, masks fall away, faces become vulnerable, receptive. Filmgoers do not defend their emotions, rather they open to the storyteller in ways even their lovers never know, welcoming laughter, tears, terror, rage, compassion, passion, love, hate
the ritual often exhausts them. — Robert McKee

I have been performing in the street for more than 50 years: magic for basically 60 years, and the high wire 45 years. The beauty of it is that it's never the same. It's never easy. And yet, part of my art is to make it look easy. — Philippe Petit

I love Mix Tape. It combines three great elements - magic, music and a natural way of performing. I know that every time you perform Mix Tape you will feel like you're presenting someone with a very special gift. I've never come across a routine so natural and so strong. Use this and you will be the wonder worker they talk about long after you have left. — Luke Jermay

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. — Penn Jillette

Performing magic has a lot to do with the arrangement of apparent coincidences and providing pathways along which desires can travel, or, to put it in more basic terms, there's little point in sigilizing for a lottery win if you don't also buy a lottery ticket. — Grant Morrison

My progression into acting was pretty slow. I was constantly performing in different kinds of small shows. One year I would be in a magic show, the next year in a circus show, then a small play, and then a dance show. — Roberto Aguire

When Pixies broke up in 1993, I gave up the drums for the longest time. I hadn't been doing a lot, but I ended up attending a magic convention that initially got me interested. I took classes, bought videos, and practiced relentlessly. I began performing at parties and soon realized that developing an on-stage routine is often tougher than being a musician. I focused my act on magic that incorporated as much science as it did entertainment, which was really satisfying for me. — David Lovering

And here, all momentum left him. He could go no farther. The theater tickets had been intended as a romantic gesture, a let's-do-something-romantic-because-all-we-do-is-fight, and she'd abandoned him there, she'd left him onstage performing CPR on a dead actor and gone home, and now she wanted him to buy milk. Now that he'd stopped walking, Jeevan was cold. His toes were numb. All the magic of the storm had left him, and the happiness he'd felt a moment earlier was fading. — Emily St. John Mandel

Heinrich Heine once imagined the exiled Israelite as a dog who regains his stolen manhood only when he embraces the Sabbath bride. I see western swing performing a similar function in hardscrabble Texas, turning dirt-poor hired hands into Dapper Dans with magic feet at the Saturday night hoe-down. — Clive Sinclair

I always call performing live "giving the people the medicine," because when you're engaged in it, you can feel the sort of soul magic being exchanged between the performer and the audience. — Nick Offerman

Stars wide of belt often cultivated a gentlemanly grandeur, a groomed refinement that filtered through their fingertips - the dainty fidgets of Hardy's plump digits, Orson Welles performing magic tricks with nimble dexterity, Jackie Gleason lofting a teacup to his lips as if he were Lady Bracknell - or through a fine set of twinkle-toes. — James Wolcott

I started performing when I was 9 or 10, doing magic. — Matt McGorry

Magic is really performing special effects live. — Michael Carbonaro

Working 9 to 5 is structure. But tying lines together all hours of day is structure at its best performing magic. — C.C. Wyatt