David Copperfield Quotes

I'm the luckiest man in the world - performing 500 shows a year and loving what I do - illusion IS my day to day life.

My father kind of encouraged me through that. Exactly,[work] not as an actor, obviously, but as someone in show business that had some success. He told me to live the impossible. "Live the impossible!"

I love what I'm doing, I love creating new things.

All of the [Bob] Fosse-esque movements and point of view informed years and years of what I would do.

My job is to make people dream. Of course, there's a lot of technical stuff behind the scenes and a lot of hard work behind it, but I get to watch people see the result of that hard work and feel that wonder and feel that discovery, all the time.

I learned that there were two ways I could live my life: following my dreams or doing something else. Dreams aren't a matter of chance, but a matter of choice. When I dream, I believe I am rehearsing my future.

The inspiration for my illusions comes from many places. Most often they come from my dreams, or an everyday occurrence in life.

I think the negative reinforcement really helped me in my very beginnings.

From the very beginning, I studied acting, directing, lighting, dance and movement. I didn't rely on just the magic to take place. It's a shame that a lot of magicians just rely on the trick itself and they have no other abilities. They get away with the wonder factor, and I don't think that's enough. It's great, but it's not enough.

Pippin had an opening number called "Magic to Do," and Jules Fisher, the brilliant lighting designer lit it. Tony Walton did all of the sets. As a kid I thought, "Wow, I'm seeing onstage what a MGM musical would look like live." It was that good, and it was directed by Bob Fosse.

When I started doing magic as a kid, my parents had no problem.

When people say you can't do it - that it's impossible - never lose hope. Just because they couldn't doesn't mean you can't.

I have a bunch of islands in the Bahamas that we made into this amazing, magical place. And we have these birds; they're trained to do certain things on the island, which is awesome. These toucans had a baby toucan, and the baby toucan, every hour that you'd look at this toucan, he would change.

I discovered Musha Cay and the islands around it in the Exumas.

I'm really happy that I had the foundations of knowing where I came from.

Let sleeping dogs lie — who wants to rouse 'em?

There was another guy suggested. He was a tall and dark-haired and Jewy, and I said, "No, he's too close to me." It ended up being Jerry Seinfeld.

Magic is the only profession where it's easy to lie about your talent. If you do a trick and you can learn it very quickly, you can fool somebody into thinking you're a great magician.

I went to visit Frank Capra, one of my idols, and did a kind of Judd Apatow interview with him. I said, "I'd like the Statue of Liberty to disappear, but I want to do it as a lesson in freedom, how valuable freedom is and what the world would be like without liberty." And Frank Capra looked at me and said, "David, I love your idea, but here's what you're going to do. You're going to try and it's not going to work; it's not going to disappear." And I said, "Mr. Capra, I can't do that."

The more educated you get, the better shot you have to get it right, but if you're really trying something different, it's a challenge every time.

Demonic figures and occult themes have disappeared from modern magic.

The real secret of magic lies in the performance.

There was an old brochure for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts with a quote from Robert Redford or someone, that said, "You're only as good as you dare to be bad."

To make magic credible on screen is always very difficult. The story is the most important thing. That is what should win. If sacrifices or compromises are made, it's usually for story. Story in magic is very, very important to me. That's what I've really championed through my career.

I am fortunate to have the resources to have many methods to do each of my illusions.

I've always taken a lot of cues from comedy minds. The guy that discovered me in the very beginning was Joseph Cates. Joe and Gil Cates were the Cates brothers. Gil produced the Oscars for many years. Joe produced a lot of comedy specials, Steve Martin specials, and he discovered me, this 18-year-old kid.

All my TV shows are done live in front of audiences, and all the material I take on the road and travel with them test them for hundreds and hundreds of shows before I shoot them for TV.

I really wanted to succeed. I wanted to be accepted. I read every magic book that I possibly could, studied every move, and by the time I was 12, they really accepted me, they embraced me.

I'm a big fan of the Pixar movies, and Ed Catmull, who wrote a book about his experiences producing them, talks about how it takes three or four years to get it right.

The key is for the audience never to know, so I have a plan B for every illusion.

I was a captive and a slave. I loved Dora Spenlow to distraction! She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I dont know what she was--anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted.

Everyone understands cards and relates to it. They have them in their homes and in their hands, so it makes them very accessible.

Actually, I started as a ventriloquist and my music teacher said, "Why don't you emcee the talent show?" My act was out of the back of Boys' Life magazine-they had a whole series of jokes in the back of Boys' Life magazine for Boy Scouts. So my act was jokes with my ventriloquist figure, and it was really bad, but I walked into the classroom afterward and the kids went, "Wow, you're cool." I wasn't cool at all, but I thought, "Well, this is a pretty good deal."

I had a point of view, which was different. I looked at magic as theater, as storytelling, and I tried to have an approach that was different from what they were doing. "How can I move people and really get them to dream with a card trick, with coin magic, or even a piece of stage magic?"

I have always looked to movies and theatre for inspiration.

If I was gay, why would I hide it?

I started as a ventriloquist, a very bad ventriloquist. And people saw my lips moving and it was ridiculous, so finally I decided I'd better change my occupation.

I'm trying to change theater, in my own way - not just magic. I say that humbly, because I'm learning every single day. I do 15 shows a week, and every single audience I have is like a test screening for you, when you listen and go, "Really? They laughed at that?" All over the stage I have lines, written onstage, that I'm changing every single day.

As I did more of that, I realized, "Well, maybe I should do more magic."

I need a form of escape even when I'm working really hard.

I could vanish the silk better than Ben Vereen - that was for sure. So I think maybe they said, "Okay, maybe he has something to offer." Years pass and I get a bit of a career, and Ben Vereen ends up hosting one of my specials where I walked through the Great Wall of China. Things came full circle in kind of an ironic way, when you have that honor of people that have influenced you so much host your show. It's a huge experience in your life.

When you see me do a five-minute thing, there's been about two years of preparation behind that. You know, I find that's what it takes to really make it the level of quality I prefer.

I'm really trying hard not to do anything that has been done before. So knowing everything I can about the legacy of magic challenges my team and I to invent new illusions.

My mother was really loving and wonderful and tough as hell.

Magic came very easy for me when I was a kid. When I was 8 years old I started doing it, and by the time I was 12, I was already published in magic books

For me, I was watching Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Orson Welles, Victor Fleming movies, and I said, "I want to tell stories like that. I want to move people like that. But I'm good at magic, so what am I going to do?" So I started using magic for the right reasons - to get the girl.

When the time came to say, "Mom, I want to do this as a job," it was brutal. She was really against it. There were screaming matches. Some people are shut down by that and get defeated by it, and other people are empowered by the negativity. My father kind of encouraged me through that.

Magicians are the people who began to use film as an illusion on stage.