Ricky Jay Quotes

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Ricky Jay

Profession : Actor

Birth : June 26, 1946

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

Ricky Jay

Magicians from the nineteenth century threw cards distances, but I think I'm the first one who made a thing about using them as weapons.

Ricky Jay

I was considered a comedy magician. And - how do I put this without sounding egotistical? - it didn't take me long to realize that comedy magicians usually couldn't do comedy or magic.

Ricky Jay

Theft annoys me more than anything else. The purloining of effects from another magician. Some people think it's massive to steal the secrets of nuclear reactors, but to steal a card move is trivial. They're wrong.

Ricky Jay

I never talk much about my family, but my grandfather was friendly with these guys, with magicians and ventriloquists on the highest levels, and I was just... interested.

Ricky Jay

I love amazing people. I love dazzling them. That's why I think performing magic is one of the greatest things a person can do.

Ricky Jay

Dai Vernon, the greatest sleight of hand figure in the history of the art, rarely performed. But he invented magic and had an enormous influence on the whole range of sleight of hand. And so often, the magic he was doing was to fool other magicians.

Ricky Jay

There are enormous dangers in thinking that the world online is the world as it exists, that what you get from your one stroke on the Internet is all there is to know.

Ricky Jay

Like every art form, there are jealousies and angers and competitiveness in magic. But there's camaraderie among magicians, whether you perform it for a living or you're an enthusiast.

Ricky Jay

I wasn't obsessed by magic. People say, 'How you can you claim you practiced eight hours a day and weren't obsessed?' Well, people go to a job they don't even like for eight hours a day; it's not obsessive if it's something you like.

Ricky Jay

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.

Ricky Jay

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

Ricky Jay

I certainly was performing before my writing was published, because I was performing when I was very young. And the thing is I'm very comfortable on stage, so a large portion of my act did come from ad-libs.

Ricky Jay

My father was the Formica King of Long Island, and my mother was the daughter of a Bengal Lancer in India.

Ricky Jay

I suppose that if I could only do one thing, a solid card effect would be pretty high on the list. That's the root of it all, sleight-of-hand. It's certainly the thing I feel most comfortable with.

Ricky Jay

I do think deception... There's something kind of odd about tricking people for a living, but ultimately, it's a remarkably honest profession, when you think about it. If you violate that code, and you say you're not using camera tricks, and then you do, I actually think that's a kind of serious moral issue.

Ricky Jay

For the most part, magic secrets are available on a level that's overwhelming and frightening, and they are very accessible if you do the tiniest bit of digging. But, that said, there's a certain group of individuals, in which I am included, who are very tight about secrets and don't share them with anyone.

Ricky Jay

I don't know what first got me to attack melons. It's not like I ate a bad one and got an upset stomach. It just eventually seemed like the appropriate fruit.

Ricky Jay

One of the best sleight-of-hand guys I know is a plumber.

Ricky Jay

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.

Ricky Jay