A Quote by Penn Jillette

There are performers who have built their whole career doing magic on TV and can't really perform live at all - don't really have jobs and skills. — © Penn Jillette
There are performers who have built their whole career doing magic on TV and can't really perform live at all - don't really have jobs and skills.
The performances had to be live. When you play it back, you can see if the hands aren't really doing the right thing, and then the whole magic falls apart.
Just concentrate on the performers. Make sure you get the performers, and that's it. That's all we need to do." And I was thinking, "Well what if you do both? Of course the performance is important, the writing is really important. But what if you could have the perfect marriage of making it look really slick as well?" I think that's kind of what I tried to develop as a style, and Spaced was the first TV show I did where all the elements came together.
Magic is like special effects live, and I love to perform, so it sounded like doing magic tricks were a good way to entertain people.
We didn't have a whole lot of money when I was growing up either. I would always ask for magic books or magic tricks for my birthday or for Christmas and the rest of the year I either had to mow lawns or find part time jobs to help supplement the cost of doing magic.
There is always magic to be summoned at any point. I love to live in a world of magic, but not a fake world of magic. We all really basically have a lot of magic... It’s only those of us who choose to accept it, that really understand it. It’s there for everyone. That’s the only thing that I feel I am able to give to people and that’s why I know that they respond to me because I try to give them only their own magic... not mine, but theirs
Since the 1980s, I've been known more for my TV work, I used to host 'Live at Jongleurs' and of course 'Grumpy Old Men,' and so it's really all come from there. It's been a funny career really, there are people that know me now as a TV person, a comedian, an interviewer - I've had people genuinely gobsmacked to find out I am a musician.
I'm doing a little bit of acting, but I can't really say it's going to be a career or even that I'm really suited to it. It's a whole other craft you have to study and be passionate about.
I watch like, Steve Jobs interviews, I don't really watch TV. I stopped watching TV when I turned like ten because my parents were like, 'TV's really bad for you.'
I was doing the 'Vogue' fashion awards when I was 16, live on VH1. I was coming down the steps, and I'm a really hard walker. I hadn't had a mistake yet in my career. Everything had been perfect. So I come down the steps on live TV, and I slip. I didn't fall, but you could see the look on my face. I was mortified. I was devastated.
Since I was very young, probably two or three, I had really good memorization skills. I would memorize stuff from TV and perform it for my family. I was the little performer for most of my early life. So eventually, my mom caught onto that and thought I might want to get into acting.
I do know that there is a difference between artists who are career-driven and artists who have a calling and are just compelled to make music, compelled to perform live, and the business isn't the reason they're doing it. In fact, there isn't really a reason. You just do it.
A lot of what I do on WWE TV is what I was doing on the NXT Live events. That wasn't really seen by anybody. But now I get to do it on live television.
I'm really lucky. I never really felt like LA was the Mecca, that you "made it" if you made it somewhere else. I've been a journeyman actor for my whole career. I just sort of went where I was invited. I worked the early part of my career in Canada before I had the luxury of doing an American series, which brought me down to LA.
What you learn from working with other performers and musicians is invaluable, really, and can only help you grow. I mean, if you spend your whole life focusing on yourself, you're not really learning much.
It's really hard to think of one kind of magic as a favorite. I've been really fortunate in that I've been able to perform such a diverse range of things.
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.
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