It was just like a digital fixation with cards and math and science and then I started to look at images of great magicians from Houdini down the line.

My mother was a teacher, and when she wanted to show me art and literature and science, she'd take me to museums, parks and free exhibitions.

My mother encouraged it so much. She was so supportive. Even if as a kid, I would do the dumbest trick, which now that I look back on some things, she would love it, she would say that's amazing, or if I'd make the ugliest drawing, she would hang it up. She was amazing.

I do a lot of research on what people have done in the past.

Basically, I was a kid growing up with a single mother in Brooklyn.

In truth, the only restrictions on our capacity to astonish ourselves and each other are imposed by our own minds.

I think everything I do is normal, not paranormal but normal. Its using the power of the mind to achieve whatever we can endure.