The audiences are what keep me enthusiastic.

Dreams are illusions, and we can't let go of them because we would be dead.

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.

Like in comedy, you know the names of the people who steal things that others work really hard on. It really sucks. And, in magic, it's not just the hard work of getting the words and attitude and point of view right; you're taking an actual invention, making something over three or four years, and somebody can just take it.

I was an only child. We were so poor, my parents and I had the same room.

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."

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.