Teller

“Onstage, I find absolutely nothing but exhilaration in not talking.”

“I believe in art.”

“The Boy Scouts of America is no longer entirely what people think it is. Essentially, it has been hijacked by religious conservatives.”

“Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

“I'm more apt to cry at something beautiful than at something sad.”

“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.”

“Nobody who is a Penn & Teller fan thinks of us first and foremost as magicians, but as a comedy team.”

“People take reality for granted.”

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

“Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.”

“I'm a lazy sod.”

“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.”

“As a kid, I was a Hitchcock lover; I cared about the dark side of things.”

“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.”

“If you read Shakespeare's stage directions, all the gore and violence is right in there.”

“Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.”

“People do not come to a Penn & Teller show to see a magic show. They just don't. They come to see weird stuff that they can see no place else, that will make them laugh and make the little hairs stand up on the backs of their necks.”

“Generally, magicians don't know what to say, so they say stupid and redundant crap like, 'Here I am holding a red ball.'”

“Doing beautiful things is its own reward.”

“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.”