A Quote by Angus Wilson
All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery, a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't.
Related Quotes
The goal is to really blur the line. Can you perform a magic trick in a way that someone doesn't think it's a magic trick but is something amazing they haven't seen before? Then they have to wrestle with reality.
People who believe in a divine creator, trying to live their lives in obedience to his supposed wishes and in expectation of a supposed eternal reward, are victims of the greatest confidence trick of all time.
It gives me confidence to know that what I'm writing has a veracity of its own without me having to invent it. When I'm writing fiction, I must believe it to be true, or I can see no point in it.
Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.
It’s in the very trickery that it pleases me. But show me how the trick is done, and I have lost my interest therein.
My experience in work, even going to work with Scorsese, is that people always think there's some magic trick. There's no magic trick. The people who are really good at what they do do simple things really, really well.
To me, it's never about the trick. I don't care about how something works. I care about how people feel when they watch it. You know, that - that connection - that emotional connection is true magic.
People think they want to know how magic works, but really they don't. How it works is never as amazing as what the trick was in the first place, so it's never going to make you feel good. Somebody just wanting to know how a trick works is never enough to make me want to tell them.
It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.
Everything I do is alchemy. That's why I believe in magic. Not black magic, not the satanic magic that they practice in Hollywood and that the deep state practices and that the media practice. I believe in good magic, light magic, alchametic magic.
Somehow, I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true. The special secret it seems to me is summarized in four C's. They are Curiosity, Courage, Confidence and Constancy. And the greatest of all is Confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably.
Magic trick: to make people disappear, ask them to fulfill their promises.
I always believe in trying something extra-ordinary and fighting against myself, gives me the biggest confidence boost.
It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.
I liked the idea of having actual magic performed as stage magic, so you could assume that it was just a trick, that something is all smoke and mirrors, but there's that, like, feeling at the back of your mind: What if it's not?
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