23 February 2012

Magic’s binary:  It’s either/or.  It’s a house of cards, and if the whole thing doesn’t fool you, you might as well not do it.

When especially your classic nerd covers himself with rubber cement and runs around saying he’s a horrible burn victim, that is not, those video games… no matter what Hillary Clinton says, the video games that celebrate that kind of excitement are not celebrating death; they’re not celebrating pain; they’re celebrating health.  You rip that rubber cement off and you’re okay, and you’re healthy, and you’re feeling fine.  What makes the stuff beautiful is the fact that it is a trick.  It’s not beautiful if it’s real.  If you’re really in box of your own shit, that’s not beautiful.  Unless you’re going to the moon… it’s not beautiful.

What you want out of art, what you want out of life, what you want out of sex is for the visceral and the intellectual to collide as fast as they can.  When you’re on a rollercoaster, your guts tell you, ‘We’re gonna die.’  Your intellect tells you, ‘If everybody died, their insurance rates would be too high; they couldn’t keep the park open.’

It’s very important that in our entire career, we’ve never been hurt.  If you want life-threatening, don’t go to a magician.

-Penn Jillette