Justin Flom Quotes

You have to learn certain skills to present magic.

For me, the most exciting thing is to create good magic that's entertaining for an audience, and it would be lovely if a magician was fooled as well.

But when I go off stage I don't have a deck of cards with me all the time.

I'm such a proponent of the theatrical experience and the cinematic experience, and we've reached this point where the magicians are not only giving away their tricks, but they're telling us how they're doing the tricks in advance before you even come to the magic show. It'd be nice to get a little of the mystery back in.

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

When I was six years old, I fell in love with magic. For Christmas, I got a magic box and a very old book on card manipulation. Somehow, I was more interested in pure manipulation than in all the silly little tricks in the box.

I intend to do the Penn & Teller show until they pry my cheesy magic wand from my cold dead fingers.

The skills that we have are the actual magic skills - not the performing skills. We have to separate those. But the actual skills that make the tricks work, we don't get to use again.

There's something about the Houdini act that is not always made clear - about the escape act in general.

I don't put a girl in a box and clap my hands three times, and she's gone. I get in the box, and I vanish, and I reappear at the other side of the stage. That way, people don't think, 'That's a great illusion.' They think, 'Doug's a great magician.'

My goal was becoming the next David Copperfield. I learned how to be a performer by emulating him as a kid - his formula of just talking to people onstage, being free to improvise, being charming and witty with a crowd, together with great, beautiful magic.

When you're learning how to do magic, the first rule is 'never reveal a secret.' In a way, by telling someone I'm a magician, it kind of gives away the best secret of all... How interesting to take the magician out of the equation of a magic show.

If you do magic, it's the quickest most fraudulent route to impressing people.

I thought magic tricks would be a really good way to start conversations. I looked them up on YouTube and slowly mastered them.

Magicians will always tell you the trick is the most important thing, but I'm more interested in telling a story.

What I've tried to do in my stage magic is to take a trick and give it an emotional hook.

When I started out back in Louisville, there was Harry Collins. He was my first teacher. He saw that I was so obsessed with magic that he taught me the love of magic.

Magic is the oldest part of the show business profession. It can now be used as a forward-thinking tool to build a child's confidence. It has been an amazing part in many entertainers' lives, including Steve Martin and the late Johnny Carson.

Magic is all about directing attention. If I didn't want you to look at my right hand then I don't look at it.

When I did my first few television specials, my illusions were so advanced that it took a couple of years before the other illusionists could even figure out what I was doing, let alone try to imitate me.

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.

In magic, it takes two or three years for me to create a 5-minute illusion for me to get it to the level I want.

Growing up, yeah, I had a magic kit with learn tricks and learn card tricks, but I was never... I used to watch whatever magic special was on as a kid, but then, it's not that I lost interest, but to be a magician, you really, it's really hard work. Learning lines is hard enough; learning sleight of hand, that's real practice.

The real secret of magic lies in the performance.

I started performing when I was 9 or 10, doing magic.