I just believe that the feeling of wonder is amazing. I am pushing myself as far as I can humanly push myself... I can only hope for the best and expect the worse.

As a kid, I always was obsessed with Houdini.

In truth, the only restrictions on our capacity to astonish ourselves and each other are imposed by our own minds.

I believe that fear of life brings a greater fear of death.

My only fear is the unknown.

I just believe that the feeling of wonder is amazing. I am pushing myself as far as I can humanly push myself... I can only hope for the best and expect the worse.

We are all capable of infinitely more than we believe.

I have not had time to reflect on my own truths in many years.

As a kid I used to hold my breath longer than anybody else, and then I heard stories about people accidently underwater for 45 minutes - how do you recover from that? It's not a miracle. Something allows us to survive.

Basically, I was a kid growing up with a single mother in Brooklyn.

But as they say about sharks, it's not the ones you see that you have to worry about, it's the ones you don't see.

I don't think you can say something is or isn't magic. That's what was cool about Houdini, because he was a magician who had a magic show, but he was also an escape artist, and they kind of, over time, blended together. They both kind of enhance each other, I think.

I hope people remember me as a guy who brought magic to the people. You know, pushed the boundaries of wonder.

I remember finding a Houdini book at the library and seeing an image of him chained on the side of a building. He looked so intense and scary, and I couldn't get that image out of my head. That started building up my love of magic.

I remember my mother had this deck of cards that her mother had given her and that she passed on to me. It was a gypsy tarot deck that I used to carry everywhere.

I think anybody can do any of these if they train. I don't recommend it, but anybody could do it if there was a need.

I think everything I do is normal, not paranormal but normal. It's using the power of the mind to achieve whatever we can endure.

I think magic, whether I'm holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards, is pretty simple. It's practice, it's training, and it's - It's practice, it's training and experimenting, while pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be.

I think that when Evel Knievel crashed over the fountain at Caesar's, it kind of gave you a credibility and then anticipation for everything he did.

I thought instead of burying myself under dirt, I'd bury myself under water so everybody could see that you're there.

I was obsessed with the idea of fasting and isolation.

I'd go to Coney Island to hang out, and I saw a magician doing a rope trick on the boardwalk. I was fascinated. I guess that's how it started.

It was just like a digital fixation with cards and math and science and then I started to look at images of great magicians from Houdini down the line.

Magic's an art where you use slight of hand or illusion to create wonder. And I was just intrigued with that idea.

My mother encouraged it so much. She was so supportive. Even if as a kid, I would do the dumbest trick, which now that I look back on some things, she would love it, she would say that's amazing, or if I'd make the ugliest drawing, she would hang it up. She was amazing.

My mother was a teacher, and when she wanted to show me art and literature and science, she'd take me to museums, parks and free exhibitions.

People haven't even begun to tap into the potential of what the mind is possible of doing. We only use a certain percentage of our brains.

Whether you're shuffling a deck of cards or holding your breath, magic is pretty simple: It comes down to training, practice, and experimentation, followed up by ridiculous pursuit and relentless perseverance.

Magic is not about having a puzzle to solve. It's about creating a moment of awe and astonishment. And that can be a beautiful thing

Without feeling abashed by my ignorance, I confess that I am absolutely unable to say. In the absence of an appearance of learning, my answer has at least one merit, that of perfect sincerity.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own.

The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too.

I've always wanted to sing, just as I've always known that one day I would have my own niche in the annals of song. It was a feeling I had.

The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.

I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.

Then came the choreography... the impact of music and choreography tends to really emphasize an overall feeling of what you really want out of the program.

On that road of the informer, it is always night. I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure, because it is necessary.

I was as big as I have ever been. I had a personal trainer and was working out. I was feeling good. I was muscular. I had never weighed more than 155 pounds.

Lately, I can't shake the feeling that I've been living a dream for the last 10 years or so; I can't account for most of my 20s, and I have to continually remind myself that certain people are dead now and many of my friends have children.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

Collectively, we must do more than simply watch, with resignation and a feeling of powerlessness, reports on the evening news about the latest terrorist atrocity.

But even if I'm left high and dry at the end of this wild journey, just taking it is a great feeling.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

They must have a feeling of do or die. It is such an overcrowded profession.

You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.

But I remember feeling as a producer I felt like the guy who called the caterer and got the band; I had to work the party while everybody else was having a good time.

Faith means living with uncertainty - feeling your way through life, letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark.

The only thing that's a little tricky about it is sometimes people assume that if it's a new song, it's a reflection of what you're feeling or going through now.