David Copperfield Quotes

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

When people say you can't do it - that it's impossible - never lose hope. Just because they couldn't doesn't mean you can't.

The real secret of magic lies in the performance.

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.

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.

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

The most important thing is presentation.

Stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will'.

Before there can be wonders, there must be wonder.

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

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

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.

In movies, storytelling and every single art form, we're creating wonder. You're starting with a blank page and creating something that doesn't exist.

From the very beginning, I studied acting, directing, lighting, dance and movement. I didn't rely on just the magic to take place. It's a shame that a lot of magicians just rely on the trick itself and they have no other abilities. They get away with the wonder factor, and I don't think that's enough. It's great, but it's not enough.

No, I think marriage is a great thing.

My job is to make people dream. Of course, there's a lot of technical stuff behind the scenes and a lot of hard work behind it, but I get to watch people see the result of that hard work and feel that wonder and feel that discovery, all the time.

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

To make magic credible on screen is always very difficult. The story is the most important thing. That is what should win. If sacrifices or compromises are made, it's usually for story. Story in magic is very, very important to me. That's what I've really championed through my career.

I love what I'm doing, I love creating new things.

Marriage is like a formality for me.

The inspiration for my illusions comes from many places. Most often they come from my dreams, or an everyday occurrence in life.

You have to learn certain skills to present magic.

Science and technology were often used by [the magician of old], even before they came into the marketplace on a mass basis. For example, prior to the moving picture going into theatre, magicians were using the technique of images in motion as illusions in their shows. At that time the process was so new, an audience perceived it as magic. Also in the early stages of holograms magicians would use these images to baffle and mystify their fans. Hence, you always need to stay one step ahead of the technology game to "WOW" the audience.

For me, I was watching Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Orson Welles, Victor Fleming movies, and I said, "I want to tell stories like that. I want to move people like that. But I'm good at magic, so what am I going to do?" So I started using magic for the right reasons - to get the girl.

Magicians lose the opportunity to experience a sense of wonder.

I am fortunate to have the resources to have many methods to do each of my illusions.

My dreams are my dress rehearsals for my future.

Magicians are the people who began to use film as an illusion on stage.

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.

If you ever saw All That Jazz [1979], Bob Fosse was kind of raised dancing in strip joints and the whole era of burlesque, and that form ran his visual aesthetic, the pacing and rhythm of what he did.

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

I got to watch Frank Capra, in his eighties, in action. You read all the stories about Frank Capra fighting with the head of Columbia, Harry Cohn, "It's my way or the highway." I got to watch that. He lambasted me, "You cannot do this. You will fail." Finally, after another hour of conversation, I convinced him to help me write the speech.

The key is for the audience never to know, so I have a plan B for every illusion.

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!

When the time came to say, "Mom, I want to do this as a job," it was brutal. She was really against it. There were screaming matches. Some people are shut down by that and get defeated by it, and other people are empowered by the negativity. My father kind of encouraged me through that.

What you think is impossible in life actually is possible.

For me to grow, I have to know about the foundation that came before.

I have always looked to movies and theatre for inspiration.

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.

I learned that there were two ways I could live my life: following my dreams or doing something else. Dreams aren't a matter of chance, but a matter of choice. When I dream, I believe I am rehearsing my future.

I'm the luckiest man in the world - performing 500 shows a year and loving what I do - illusion IS my day to day life.

We all possess the need to dream.

You lose your sense of wonder the more you learn, right? When you go to film school and learn about moviemaking, you go to see movies and then only see where the lights are, where the cuts are, watching it from a technical basis, nodding your head, "Oh, that was good." The feeling of surprise, the feeling of being transported is further away.

I need a form of escape even when I'm working really hard.

When I am on the road and heading to my next venue, I think about my audience.

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

The audience likes to be taken on new journeys.

I discovered something amazing, which has caused a lot of controversy - the fountain of youth. I have to keep it a secret!

Actually, I started as a ventriloquist and my music teacher said, "Why don't you emcee the talent show?" My act was out of the back of Boys' Life magazine-they had a whole series of jokes in the back of Boys' Life magazine for Boy Scouts. So my act was jokes with my ventriloquist figure, and it was really bad, but I walked into the classroom afterward and the kids went, "Wow, you're cool." I wasn't cool at all, but I thought, "Well, this is a pretty good deal."

There was a guy named Ed Mishell. He was this grandfatherly guy who did all the illustrations for the catalogs and reviewed magic effects for the magic magazines, so all of the magic dealers would send him magic effects for free-it was a great deal. His basement was full of this stuff. He took me under his wing, and he would sneak me into the Society of American Magicians meetings in New York. It's the world's oldest magic organization.