In the winters, I enrolled in the hotel management program at Cornell University. I naively thought that I knew something about sleight-of-hand, entertainment and food, and that would be all I needed.

I started doing radio pieces with no clear, preconceived idea, except that I have a tendency to be theatrical.

Maybe the the luxury of not having acting be my only profession is that I can be more selective about what I choose to be in. I've been really lucky in terms of film projects with people, terrific actors and also writers and directors that I really respect.

Once you get into the era of the printed book, it gets a little easier. After years and years, you make a serious survey of that literature, and then you make it more specific depending on what kind of case appears. I never set out to collect material on cheating at bowling, but I found out that after 20 years, I had a lot of material on cheating at bowling.

One of the reasons I don't like to use the word "tricks" , I do think of them as theatrical pieces, and as pretentious as that might sound, there's a real reason for it. It's not the idea of tricking you; it's the idea of taking you along on this particular journey the way you would in any other theatrical situation. But, hopefully, you're going to be fooled at the end.

Not only do I lie, I take real pleasure in lying, in the transmission of magic effects.

I always read what I write out loud, and I did that long before any radio thing. My editor finds that unusual.