“Magicians do not, as a rule, presume that their audiences are intelligent and sensitive enough to want the magic to be challenging and cathartic. This is not a healthy starting point, for it stultifies magic and leaves it too close to children’s entertainment.”
Books, Absolute Magic - A Model for Powerful Close-Up Performance (2003) second edition
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Derren Brown 136
British illusionist 1971Related quotes
“But magic can't operate without a magician, and being a magician can beat a man to his knees.”
The Wheel of Fortune (1984), Part 6: Hal
Christian Chelman, 1993, Capricornian Tales, L & L Publishing, p. 6
“I know magicians and I know magic and I say this: all magicians lie and this one more than most.”
Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Quoted as the opening passage of "BOOK ONE: The Functions of Language" in Language in Thought and Action (1949) by S. I. Hayakawa, p. 3
Words and Their Meanings (1940)
Context: A great deal of attention has been paid … to the technical languages in which men of science do their specialized thinking … But the colloquial usages of everyday speech, the literary and philosophical dialects in which men do their thinking about the problems of morals, politics, religion and psychology — these have been strangely neglected. We talk about "mere matters of words" in a tone which implies that we regard words as things beneath the notice of a serious-minded person.
This is a most unfortunate attitude. For the fact is that words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. The old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect — but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence. Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them. "A mere matter of words," we say contemptuously, forgetting that words have power to mould men's thinking, to canalize their feeling, to direct their willing and acting. Conduct and character are largely determined by the nature of the words we currently use to discuss ourselves and the world around us.
“Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is inexplicable.”
As quoted in Thoughts from Earth (2004) by James Randall Miller
"Without a Trace" (review of The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert), New York Times Sunday Book Review, 10 February 2014, page BR1 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/books/review/the-sixth-extinction-by-elizabeth-kolbert.html?_r=0