I got to watch Frank Capra, in his eighties, in action. You read all the stories about Frank Capra fighting with the head of Columbia, Harry Cohn, "It's my way or the highway." I got to watch that. He lambasted me, "You cannot do this. You will fail." Finally, after another hour of conversation, I convinced him to help me write the speech.

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

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."

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.

Everything that you'd see on The Ed Sullivan Show was at the Tannen's Magic. You'd think that if you could afford a trick like Doc Nixon's Dove Vanish, then you could be on The Ed Sullivan Show as an 8-year-old kid.

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.

For one of my specials, I said, "I'm going to make an airplane disappear." Okay! And the next day, everything went crazy - it was like breaking the internet before the internet.