A Quote by Penn Jillette

If you want to talk about magic, the stuff that blows me away is the stuff that's done close up. — © Penn Jillette
If you want to talk about magic, the stuff that blows me away is the stuff that's done close up.
I've been doing magic since I was five years old, and when I was trying to get acting gigs, I found I could make a good living at it. It's great to kind of shake the cobwebs off and get the feeling of a live audience again. I love close-up magic, the card stuff, the coin stuff, the really up-close David Blaine stuff.
People just want to know something, anything. It's all the stuff you never want to talk about, the private stuff.
I'm not a lawyer I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.
It's good to talk sometimes. Sometimes interviews are really good for you... You end up evaluating yourself more and talk about stuff that an ordinary person wouldn't necessarily keep revisiting. I used to close myself off and want to be alone, but now I'll call a friend. When you're in a relationship, they're that person.
I'd done plenty of dark stuff and edgy stuff and hardcore stuff, and I kind of found that stuff easy.
I think the key to being a journalist is getting your subject to feel comfortable enough to talk about stuff they want to talk about and the stuff they like and don't like, and still feel comfortable about it.
Everyone told me, "Don't ever talk about international stuff," and "Don't do long-form content online," and "Don't get too serious in news," and "Don't be too heavy" - all this stuff, all the rules. But we broke the rules, and that, ironically, has led to some of our most successful stuff.
All that stuff about my father and my childhood is interesting up to a certain point, but I kind of capsized with the family drama a long time ago. Now I want to get away from that. Not that I won't return to it, but a certain element has been exhausted, and it feels like why regurgitate all this stuff?
We're very good in America at talking about stuff, often stuff to buy. We tend to talk about our iPods. We tend to talk about cars or new fads.
Messy stuff irritates me. I don't like messiness. If you leave something around my house, I'll tell you to move it back, clean it up, throw it in the trash - don't matter, just get rid of it. I need stuff neat, organized. And once I start cleaning stuff, I don't stop until it's done. Otherwise I'm irritated all day.
If I have enough money to support myself, I'll just give stuff away. I just, I want people to see it and I want to be able to do this for a living, you know what I mean? So it's just a balance. If I'm not doing well for five years, then I'm selling stuff, but if I'm doing well and I can afford to give stuff away, I'll always do that.
I just don't want to do crap movies, man, because I just love that I can get up and talk about them and talk to journalists about stuff that I'm really proud of.
I like being married to someone who does what I do, and we can talk for hours about all of this stuff that I struggle with and all this stuff that he struggles with because we're struggling with the same things. If I was married to a banker, I don't know what we'd talk about.
My followers are some of the most loyal people out there. They know everything about me and my life. They know all my drama with guys that I have crushes on, all that stupid stuff that doesn't really matter. But all that stuff allows me to build a close relationship with them.
I think every culture - you can call it an American Ronin, a medieval knight errant, you could talk about 'Shane.' There is an archetype that I think is actually common to a lot of cultures, and even the Clint Eastwood stuff was probably as influenced by the Japanese stuff, and yet done by an Italian.
Most processes leave out the stuff no one wants to talk about: magic, intuition and leaps of faith.
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