Top 100 The Magician Quotes
#1. THE MAGICIAN
They asked St. Germain's manservant if his master was truly a thousand years old, as it was rumored he had claimed.
'How would I know?" the man replied. "I have only been in the master's employ for three hundred years.
Neil Gaiman
#2. The big spells," Mg. Thane answered, his expression plain but his bright eyes smiling. Did he know how much those eyes gave away?
Charlie N. Holmberg
#3. (C)hoice without alternative is only a sleight of hand; it is a magician's force-play, during which you believe you have free well, but your fate has already been decided: the magician knows which card you will pick!
Garth Stein
#4. The world easily finds an honourable place for the magician who produces new and dazzling things.
Mahatma Gandhi
#5. Ceony shut the book and glanced to her new teacher. "It's . . . amazing, but I admit it's also superficial. Aesthetic."
"But entertaining," he combated. "Never dismiss the value of entertainment, Ceony. Good-quality entertainment is never free, and it's something everyone wants.
Charlie N. Holmberg
#6. He had grown fond of the old proprietress, Mrs. Matalov, who had been a magician's assistant back in the 1930s, and who now, even at ninety-three, had the stoic dignity of a beautiful woman who was about to be cut in half.
Dan Chaon
#7. Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.
Tennessee Williams
#8. I get lost in the magical beauty that is all around me. My mind is an enchanted magician who mysteriously creates all of that magnificent beauty.
Debasish Mridha
#9. Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.
Gore Vidal
#10. Perhaps," Mg. Katter cut in, "she's finally gotten smart. In and out, job done."
Mg. Hughes said, "No. Not her." He paused. "She knows Emery is critical to the syndicate, they all do. He's personally invested in it. That, and she's always kept a . . . keen . . . interest in him.
Charlie N. Holmberg
#11. Divinity is accident of nature, magic is the work of an art.
Amit Kalantri
#12. The best teachers impart knowledge through sleight of hand, like a magician.
Kate Betts
#13. You know what happens at any magic show? When the magician says 'look here, look here,' the audience looks only there and nowhere else. And that's exactly what happened at the earnings conference today.
Ali Sheikh
#14. The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.
Peter S. Beagle
#15. The magician was studying her face with his green eyes. "Your face is wet," he said worriedly. "I hope that's spray. If you've become human enough to cry, then no magic in the world - oh, it must be spray. Come with me. It had better be spray.
Peter S. Beagle
#16. Theft annoys me more than anything else. The purloining of effects from another magician. Some people think it's massive to steal the secrets of nuclear reactors, but to steal a card move is trivial. They're wrong.
Ricky Jay
#17. When the audience enjoys your performance, you feel like a magician who is doing magic. It's a great feeling!
Kailash Kher
#18. Now sir, said the bulldog in his business-like way. 'Are you a animal, vegetable, or mineral?'
- The Magician's Nephew
C.S. Lewis
#19. Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to me that you're better than the rabbits we ate last night.
Barry Hannah
#20. Fiction writers, magicians, politicians and priests are the only people rewarded for entertaining us with their lies
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#21. The art of a magician is not found in the simple deception, but in what surrounds it, the construction of a reality which supports the illusion.
Jim Steinmeyer
#22. Then forgive yourself!" she shouted, pushing herself back up. She pressed her palm against the wall for support. "Everyone has a dark side! But it's their choice whether or not they cultivate it. Don't you understand? Lira's exploited hers, but not you. Not you, Emery Thane.
Charlie N. Holmberg
#23. We know all about you, Rincewind the magician. You are a man of great cunning and artifice. You laugh in the face of Death. Your affected air of craven cowardice does not fool me.
It fooled Rincewind.
Terry Pratchett
#24. Elimae was a magician with a key in her mouth, a foreign language, a matryoshka doll: uncomplicated on the surface, but with a dozen secret selves hidden inside. She thought I didn't notice her, but she's all I did notice.
Kirsty Logan
#25. History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver. (Deborah Levy, Hot Milk, p. 185)
Deborah Levy
#26. I wore white gloves. I lived with my mother & father. I was not a child. I was 37 years old. My bottom lip was swollen. I wore white gloves though I was not a servent. I did not play in a brass band. I was not a waiter. I was not a magician. I was the attendant of a museum.
Edward Carey
#27. I believe, or sense, that the universe has not been constructed from a purely mechanical, logical, rational point of view, but there is a magic afoot in the universe, that God can be looked at as a kind of a magician in which we get to perform tricks ourselves, without knowing that we're doing so.
Fred Alan Wolf
#28. The Magician's Land is a triumphant climax to the best fantasy trilogy of the decade.
Charles Stross
#29. A magician makes the visible invisible. A mime makes the invisible visible.
Marcel Marceau
#30. Back so soon?" he asked. "Too bad. I was just about to organize a search for your dead body. What happened when you knocked on the southerner magician's door to sacrifice yourself? Did they kick you out, thinking you too half-witted to waste their time on?
Maria V. Snyder
#31. Like a stage magician, the con artist misdirects suspicion. While everyone's watching for him to pull a rabbit out of a hat, he's actually sawing a girl in half. You think he's doing one trick when he's actually doing another.
You think that I'm dying, but I'm laughing at you.
Holly Black
#32. My acts are irrevocable
Because they have no essence ...
Where are the doers of deeds
Absent among their conditions?
Imagine a magician
Who creates a creature
Who creates other creatures.
Acts I perform are creatures
Who create others.
Akkineni Nagarjuna
#33. But magic, like everything else, follows certain natural laws. Magic needs energy wherever it can find it. If no other source of energy is available, it will take the life force of the magician who created it. That is why every use of magic weakens the magician.
Michael Scott
#34. I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing.
Ray Bradbury
#35. David Blaine, I think, was the first TV magician to really turn the camera around and make it about the spectator's experience. That's really what magic is all about.
Michael Carbonaro
#36. I'm no wizard, and I don't like being thought of in that light at all. I think of a wizard as being some sort of magician or something, doing something on the sly or something, and I don't want to be thought of in that way.
John Wooden
#37. A man may plan as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is likely to come of it until the magician circumstance steps in and takes the matter off his hands.
Mark Twain
#38. I'm Carter Kane-part-time high school freshman, part-time magician, full-time worrier about all the Egyptian gods and monsters who are constantly trying to kill me.
Okay, that last part is an exaggeration. Not all the gods want me dead. Just a lot of them.
Rick Riordan
#39. With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter.
Lev Grossman
#40. Ive said its a little bit like a magician performing for a convention of magicians ... all the magicians in the audience watching this illusion-Do they see the illusion, or do they see the device that made the illusion? Probably they see a little of both.
Chuck Close
#41. A patrol had been sent out to look at the road between two towns, but some Portuguese had come along and told the patrol that this was one of the English magician's roads and was certain to disappear in an hour or two taking everyone upon it to Hell - or possibly England.
Susanna Clarke
#42. I've never worried about 'the reader' because there isn't one. There are thousands, and they all have strong opinions, from 'Magician' was the best ever,' and I've gone downhill since to 'The new book is the best ever,' so to whom to I listen? So I write for myself and hope other people like it.
Raymond E. Feist
#43. Magic is the stunning art of surprising your audience, so that nothing else surprises them.
Amit Kalantri
#44. Magic : when you create something from the materials around you to astound and make the audience say "Wow." Magic happens on mundane days. It happens when you least expect it. It brings a spark to our drab and monotonous days.
Avijeet Das
#45. 'The Magician's Apprentice' was about someone from the low end of society manifesting magical power and how that completely messes up the balance of the whole system.
Trudi Canavan
#46. And, in fine, of false sciences I thought I knew the worth sufficiently to escape being deceived by the professions of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician, or by the artifices and boasting of any of those who profess to know things of which they are ignorant.
Rene Descartes
#47. Around 1974, I graduated into the occult, and spent a sold six or seven years immersed in the Kabala and the Chaldean, Celtic, and Druidic traditions I also became fascinated with Aleister Crowley, the nineteenth-century magician who shared these beliefs.
Daryl Hall
#48. A great magician is as divine as God and his stage is as majestic as the paradise.
Amit Kalantri
#49. When I was in college, being a magician was not the classiest thing to be. It was like being a folk singer before Bob Dylan.
Doug Henning
#50. After watching the house for a few days, she had concluded that the magician lived alone, but you never knew if someone had a secret lover stashed away. Or a very loud pet. That time with the peacock, for instance. Noisy birds, peacocks.
Yoon Ha Lee
#51. She imagined Mg. Thane's hands over her own, guiding her Folds, and squinted in the candlelight to ensure all her edges aligned and all her creases were straight.
Charlie N. Holmberg
#53. Unlike a mere deception or a simple secret, which gives the impression that something's been taken away, a great magician makes you feel like something's been given to you.
Jim Steinmeyer
#54. On count two, she shouted, "I deserve a stipend after this!" The words echoed offbeat with the pulsing walls.
Charlie N. Holmberg
#55. I think several generations of my family had novels in the drawer. You know the montage in 'The Royal Tenenbaums' where each character has produced some sort of minor work? It was like having a magician in the household.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#56. In the art of magic be quick of sleight and slow of climax.
Amit Kalantri
#57. I'd go to Coney Island to hang out, and I saw a magician doing a rope trick on the boardwalk. I was fascinated. I guess that's how it started.
David Blaine
#58. Love, the magician, knows this little trick whereby two people walk in different directions yet always remain side by side ...
Hugh Prather
#59. Then, things get hard, because once you know magic exists, you have to decide whether to be the bystander, or the magician ... and we were all born to be magicians.
Dianna Hardy
#60. That song is called The Three Heroes (although the word hero is used lightly in the case of the Magician) and tells the tale of the three characters of legend that are etched upon my rings: the Warrior, the Blacksmith, and the Magician.
Justin Cartwright
#61. Love is the greatest magician in the universe; it can turn pain into pleasure, agony into power, sorrow into joy, and gloom into laughter.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#62. Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.
Ben Hecht
#63. LIFE IS A MAGIC, GOD IS THE MAGICIAN
Hansrajvir
#64. Ceony shook her head. "No. Except I lost your glider. That's how I got to the barn."
"Hmm," he replied, nodding. "I hope you closed the roof."
She hadn't.
Charlie N. Holmberg
#65. The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. ... at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated.
Louis Menand
#66. Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.
James Weldon Johnson
#67. Only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new. Only he knows the secret of change, only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else, and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power.
Peter S. Beagle
#68. Liberty is so great a magician, endowed with so marvelous a power of productivity, that under the inspiration of this spirit alone, North America was able within less than a century to equal, and even surpass, the civilization of Europe.
Mikhail Bakunin
#69. Before she could touch him, he stepped back. "I've no need of a human."
"Half-Light," she corrected, still meeting his gaze in the surface. "I've no need of a dragon magician.
Susan Scott
#70. And history felt like a conjuring trick. All of this had been in plain view the entire time, but only now did the magician allow Joey to see it all.
Jay Bell
#71. One magician demanded I show him an image of the love of his life. I rustled up a mirror.
Jonathan Stroud
#72. The moon was gone, but to the magician's eyes the unicorn was the moon, cold and white and very old, lighting his way to safety, or to madness.
Peter S. Beagle
#73. Magicians disappear all the time, but as soon as a regular person does it, everyone is all scared. "Tom's gone!" "Is he a magician?" "No." "Then let's print up some flyers!"
Mitch Hedberg
#74. There were moments when Lila wondered how the hell she'd gotten here. Which steps - and missteps - she'd taken. A year ago she'd been a thief in another London. A month ago she'd been a pirate, sailing on the open seas. A week ago she'd been a magician in the Essen Tasch. And now she was this.
V.E Schwab
#75. It had not occurred to anybody in the crowd - that simple trick of inquiring about somebody who wasn't ten thousand miles away. The magician was hit hard; it was an emergency that had never happened in his experience before, and it corked him; he didn't know how to meet it.
Mark Twain
#76. If I wrote a musical it wouldn't be about me. Although I do some magic, so it would probably be about a magician who appeared and re-appeared all over the place.
Neil Patrick Harris
#77. I intended only lilies. That was my intention: a bouquet of lilies. - The Magician
Kate DiCamillo
#78. I shove my reading matter back into my messenger bag (it's a novel about a private magician for hire in Chicago - your taxpayer pounds at work) and go to stand in the doorway.
Charles Stross
#79. But that is impossible," said Peter.
"Magic is always impossible," said the magician. "It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it is magic.
Kate DiCamillo
#80. Glory be!' said the Cabby. 'I'd ha' been a better man all my life if I'd known there were things like this.
C.S. Lewis
#81. A brahmin once asked The Blessed One: "Are you a God?" "No, brahmin" said The Blessed One. "Are you a saint?" "No, brahmin" said The Blessed One. "Are you a magician?" "No, brahmin" said The Blessed One. "What are you then?" "I am awake."
Gautama Buddha
#82. That night, Kaz took Saskia's red ribbon from beneath his pillow. He rolled it into a neat spiral and clutched it in his palm. He lay in bed and tried to pray, but all he could think about was the magician's coin: there and then gone.
Leigh Bardugo
#83. He who is going to be a magician will recognize that life is dependent on the work of the elements in the various planes and spheres. It is to be seen in great and in small things, in the microcosm as well as in the macrocosm, temporarily and eternally, everywhere there are powers in action.
Franz Bardon
#84. After all," he thought, "what can a magician do against a lead ball? Between the pistol firing and his heart exploding, there is no time for magic.
Susanna Clarke
#85. But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.
Susanna Clarke
#86. According to the universal laws, the magician will form his own point of view about the universe which henceforth will be his true religion.
Franz Bardon
#87. If you would be a magician, honor the Earth. Honor life. Love. Know that magic is the birthright of every human being, and wisely use it.
Scott Cunningham
#88. We don't have much time. Mel will be out of the restroom soon."
"You've got a magician named Mel?
Rick Riordan
#89. It took me six years to get close to Picasso. I learnt a lot from him, and he was an absolute genius. He almost became my grandfather at the time. It was like he was a magician or something.
Rene Burri
#90. So you're Merlin the Magician? We studied you in school last year." I had no idea the guy was so wacky. "Oh no, Merlin was my bwother." Mermin smiled. "Made quite a name for himself in your world," he chuckled.
L.R.W. Lee
#91. The less a writer discusses his work and himself the better. The master chef slaughters no chickens in the dining room; the doctor writes prescriptions in Latin; the magician hides his hinges, mirrors, and trapdoors with the utmost care.
Jack Vance
#92. I have no cause to love Mr. Norrell- far from it. But I know this about him: he is a magician first and everything else second- and Jonathan is the same. Books and magic are all either of them really care about.
Susanna Clarke
#93. Performers and their public should never meet. Once the curtain comes down, the performer should fly away like a magician's dove.
Edith Piaf
#94. The study of nature with a view to works is engaged in by the mechanic, the mathematician, the physician, the alchemist, and the magician; but by all as things now are with slight endeavour and scanty success.
Francis Bacon
#95. Being the Magician isn't about being powerful when you have things and useless when you don't," Persephone said.
"The Magician sees what is out there and finds connections. The Magician can make anything magical.
Maggie Stiefvater
#96. It is a strange feeling for a girl when first she finds the power put into her hand of influencing the destiny of another to happiness or misery. She is like a magician holding for the first time a fairy wand, not having yet had experience of its potency.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#97. Alan Funt was the first hidden-camera magician. It was the playful nature of the way he worked that really inspired me. A lot of prank shows and hidden-camera shows can be a little mean-spirited. Funt was never like that.
Michael Carbonaro
#98. Magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you and he does.
Karl Germain
#99. Wart draggled off to the tower room, where Merlyn was busy knitting himself a woollen night-cap for the winter. "I cast off two together at every other line," said the magician, "but for some reason it seems to end too sharply. Like an onion. It is the turning of the heel that does one, every time.
T.H. White
#100. One of the finest magicians you can see is David Oliver.
Barry Nolan
