David Copperfield Quotes

I brush my teeth with a Sonicare toothbrush before every show.

To make [parents] happy, I went to Fordham University for three weeks, while at the same time running ads in Variety, "magician-actor David Copperfield."

My show is constantly evolving... new tricks are added, old ones are dropped... so it stays fresh. But it's the randomly selected participants from the audience that make it fresh and provide some of the best comic relief.

I was published in Tarbell Course in Magic when I was 12.

Tommy Chong connects to the pipe a lot.

My dreams are my dress rehearsals for my future.

Magic and new technology have always walked hand in hand - even back in the days of Robert Houdin.

But when I go off stage I don't have a deck of cards with me all the time.

There were really a bunch of old, old magic hobbyists at the time, some of them who actually had known [Harry] Houdini. You had to be 14 to go to these meetings, and he snuck me in at 12. It was glorious.

I used to fly around the stage without strings or camera tricks. That took seven years to create.

The audience likes to be taken on new journeys.

Reading [Judd Apatow] book, about his background, I think there's a great similarity. What gives him the fire to work hard? He worked hard, researching the comedians of the time, what touched him about it.

I discovered that magic tricks got me more attention from the girls in my class when I was nine - so a magician was born!

I try to help people realize their dreams by using magic to tell stories that educate, move, and inspire.

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.

You have to learn certain skills to present magic.

I was teaching magic at NYU when I was 16.

No self-respecting gay guy would have ever made some of the hair and clothing choices I am still trying to live down.

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.

I'm inventing new principles. The audience has a point of view that no one can predict.

I see people's need to dream, people's need to escape - you see it! That's why people come to comedy shows, that's why they come to your movies ... We're so needed in this world. Not as much as medicine , but to dream for a while.

Physical rehab is often very, very hard work.

I act like I'm 14, if you haven't figured that out yet.

All the lawyers and the business stuff is work, but actually creating stuff isn't work. It's good effort. It's hard work. But, it's not work. It doesn't feel like work because the result is very rewarding.

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

It's really hard to think of one kind of magic as a favorite. I've been really fortunate in that I've been able to perform such a diverse range of things.

I invented magic stuff; it came very easily. Now, I sucked at everything else, but I was good at magic as a kid.

For my father, being kind was natural... I have to really work at it. I love competing and winning, conquest - not words you usually associate with kindness.

When you're a guy and meet a girl the first time, you do whatever it takes.

You can feel better about yourself in a very short period of time depending on the kind of magic that you are doing.

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

I'm fascinated by the similarities and differences between comedians and magicians.

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

It is the unspoken ethic of all magicians to not reveal the secrets.

My uncle's house burned down when I was 6 years old. We got out safely. But ever since, I've had a nightmare of dying in a fire.

When I was a kid, people wanted to be an astronaut. Today, kids want to be famous, and that's totally the wrong approach. You have to have authenticity in what you're doing. You have to really care about the core message of what you're saying, and then everything else will fall into place.

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.

In magic, it takes two or three years for me to create a 5-minute illusion for me to get it to the level I want.

It wasn't just about doing tricks. It's about taking an audience to another place, a special place, so they can really suspend their disbelief. Its about amazing the audience as well as moving them.

Watching people react, watching people be inspired, be taken on a journey, forgetting their problems, looking ahead in their own lives to doing impossible things. That's kind of what drives me, gives me a sense of focus.

It's okay for me to be gay, but God didn't make me that way.

Ride on! Rough-shod if need be, smooth-shod if that will do, but ride on! Ride on over all obstacles, and win the race!

Before there can be wonders, there must be wonder.

For me, it's about risk taking, taking things in new directions. Because every single time, no matter how much you learn, you can never say, "Okay, I did the hardest thing I ever did. I'm prepared now. Now it's going to be easy." Of course it's not easy.

But Vegas is really my first home.

I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

Performing my show is something I constantly think about.

I'm just waiting for people to start asking me to make the rain disappear.