For me, the most exciting thing is to create good magic that's entertaining for an audience, and it would be lovely if a magician was fooled as well.

I'm probably the only kid in history whose parents made him stop taking music lessons. They made me stop studying the accordion.

The pain is bad magicians ripping off good ones, doing magic badly, and making a mockery of the art.

That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

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.

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.

I grew up like Athena — covered with playing cards instead of armor — and, at the age of seven, materialized on a TV show, doing magic.