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

Later on, towards the end of their lives, I thanked her. I said, "Mom, you were really tough." She said, "I wasn't tough! I always believed in you."

I wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times about the amazing effect of shared wonder - how I have an audience filled with people who you'd think would hate each other, people from every religious category, all at the same show at the same time. And it's an amazing phenomenon to watch this shared sense of wonder, where these people who really don't like each other - for good and bad reasons, reasons that make sense and that don't make sense - are in the same room, experiencing this unification.

There was a place in New York called Tannen's Magic. It still exists. But back in the day, it was really fantastic. You'd go into the old Wurlitzer Building, take the elevator to the 13th floor, which was labeled 14, because of bad luck, the elevator would open, and you'd be in heaven. It was all of these guys doing magic stuff with props. It's kind of gone now, that experience, the brick-and-mortar magic shop, but you really felt like you'd landed in the most amazing place in the world.

Magic was a thing that, when I did it, it made all the kids go, "Ah, that's cool."

Magic is used in espionage, all the time, for clandestine things. I've got a whole library from a gentleman who was hired by the CIA to create magic technology for the use of anti-terrorism.

The first trick I bought at Macy's was a little wooden board where a quarter would appear and disappear.