Teller Quotes

#1. 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.

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#2. Magic is an art form where you lie and tell people you are lying.

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#3. The place we want to explore unpleasantness in the real world is in art.

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#4. Neuroscientists are novices at deception.

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#5. Try that yourself sometime: Take something (or someone) you love, and -in your imagination- say goodbye forever right now. Grieve for a moment. Then feel the explosion of happiness that comes when you remind yourself you don't have to say goobye.
At least, not yet.

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#6. Doing beautiful things is its own reward.

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

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#8. 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.

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

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#10. Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.

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#11. In America, magic has never been an important part of peoples' lives.

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

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#13. I believe in art.

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#14. The silent thing onstage allows for a kind of intimacy that no conversation can have. If I just shut up, we're forced to look at each other and really confront that moment.

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

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#16. I'm more apt to cry at something beautiful than at something sad.

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#17. Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple.

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#18. Comedically, unpleasantness is great fun.

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#19. Magic's about understanding - and then manipulating - how viewers digest the sensory information.

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

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#21. To most people who have a point of view, merely being on TV is an intrinsic good.

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#22. Onstage, I find absolutely nothing but exhilaration in not talking.

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#23. Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.

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#24. 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.

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#25. I always assumed I'd spend my life happily performing in artsy-fartsy little theaters.

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

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#27. If there isn't at least the threat of violence in art, it tends to be kind of tiresome.

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

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#29. 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.

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#30. Given my absolute druthers, I would certainly like to see that every part of my body is used for spare parts for science.

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#31. People take reality for granted.

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#32. People come up to me on the street and make some little joke - like they'll say, 'Excuse me, sir, what time is it?' And I'll say, you know, '5:15,' and they'll say, 'Hey! Made you talk!' And that's merely a way of saying, 'I know your work and I like you.'

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