"Whereas you have someone like Houdini, who works really, really hard to get really, really famous, and then has actual intellectual ideas that he puts into the culture that stay there."
"When you're watching Psycho, there' s that moment when you have a visceral reaction to watching someone being stabbed. And then you have the intellectual revelation that you're not, and that's where the celebration comes in."
"We knew that we were kind of odd and creeps, and we wanted to do odd, creepy stuff for people who wanted to see that."
"We aren't people who believe that just because we're performers our opinions on everything need to be known."
"The skills that we have are the actual magic skills - not the performing skills. We have to separate those. But the actual skills that make the tricks work, we don't get to use again."
"The only place we were really told to tone it down - where other people would use the word censorship, but I wouldn't - was when we did MTV right after the Beavis and Butt-head thing."
"The medium is not the message - the message is the message."
"The First Amendment says nothing about your getting paid for saying anything. It just says you can say it. I don't believe that if a corporation pulls all the money out of you or a network pulls their money away or you get fired, you're being censored."
"The fact is that violence gives you a rush."
"Teller and I worked Renaissance Festivals and street performing - actually more real, no kidding around, Philadelphia street performing than we did Renaissance Festivals."
"One of the things that Teller and I are obsessed with, one of the reasons that we're in magic, is the difference between fantasy and reality."
"It wasn't success, because Teller and I, by the time Asparagus Valley got together - within a year, we had achieved all our goals. I mean, our goal was to earn our living doing exactly what we wanted. Which is many people's goal."
"In my private life, I'm not around any drugs or alcohol."
"If I go out to dinner with you and you order wine, I leave. I won't be around drugs and alcohol at all."
"I've never had a drink of alcohol or any drug in my life."
"I'm a hardcore libertarian - I want everything legal - but I also believe that you have the right to free association."
"I'm a big fan of huge populations of people, so you'd think with 300 million people in the country, you don't even have to please 1% to be phenomenally successful."
"But it's much more exciting to make Die Hard. One of the reasons that I think that movie is so successful is it deals with those very important blue-collar relationship themes. But it's more visually beautiful to show things blowing up. It just gives you more on the screen."
"Before you can read, you know the difference between a story and reality. And, of course, by the time you're old enough to do any real damage with an Uzi, you've learned that difference."
"I am a huge fan of proselytizing. I am a huge fan of speaking your mind. The only way we can share the universe... is by talking very strongly about what we believe."
"If you want to talk about magic, the stuff that blows me away is the stuff that's done close up."
"A joke is a way to say, 'I'm going to do something funny now. If I don't get a laugh at the end, I'm a failure.'"
"I was always a little embarrassed when there was an act on television that requires a great deal of skill but is a little goofy, and the host comes over and acts like the person doing this skill is some sort of fool for having learned to do something that's very, very difficult."
"I started out as a juggler, so I know what it means to spend eight hours a day, seven days a week practicing something that people just dismiss with a wave of hand."
"If there are two things Penn & Teller stand for, it's the truth & lying, although not necessarily in that order."
