Penn Jillette Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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Every step of progress the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake.
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You can be tops in Australia and be unheard of everywhere else.
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There is an incredible love in creating art unless somebody is saying, 'Hey, let's just make money,' because it doesn't work when you do it that way. If you are aiming for that, forget it.
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The high point was that the people are really nice - despite the crazy politics - and I loved being there. The hardest part was knowing some of the things I was probably going to write about Texas would make those nice people very unhappy.
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Even before I did stand-up, I've always been the kind of guy - and I talk about it on stage - who says I like people and I always look for the good in people. I say, 'Every person has something good about them, if you can just find it.'
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I'm not politically correct.
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I've always felt a bit hard done by in England – you know, I've won the Bisto three times in Ireland, but it has felt like nobody has even heard of me in my home country.
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If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.
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The lack of a consistent policy from major economies is the main source of volatility.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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It was the best route to get folks to understand segregation fast. Civil rights and women's rights had a clear history. Making the transition to rights for people with disabilities became easier because we had the history of the other two.
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I personally don't think ginger men have a habit of being attractive. We have to make ourselves seem attractive by doing stuff.
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I think that cancer is a life form that exists out there, and it exists in us. I think even the concept of healing is a spiritual principle that we have to really look at. I think the word itself is something we ought to get rid of, because it implies that there is illness - that there is something wrong.
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I wish I wasn't so in love, wasn't so interested, in the Internet. I wish I spent less time online and more time outside and in my head. Writing requires solitude and deep, deep daydreaming, and the Internet just kills that - its lure is toward the external; it asks you to flit from place to place.
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Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
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I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.
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The future rewards those who press on. I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. I don't have time to complain. I'm going to press on.
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Losing is no fun no matter who you lose to.
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My first reaction to Trump being elected was a visceral one. I cried for black people in general but, more particularly, for those of us at the margins who have been struggling and who have never received enough support.
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Speaking is what most people work on. They forget the thinking and the breathing and instead try to occupy space with sound.
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Writing a story starts out as a puzzle in your mind, of "What is it I'm fantasizing about right now that makes me think this is going to be worth years of work?" And you just keep pushing and trying to figure it out, and once you've hit on these resonances... Then as a screenwriter, it can be dangerous if you get too hooked on just finding things that resonate with each other, because then you risk getting into stuff that's too neat, and becomes stifled as storytelling. But you do feel like you're on the right track when you start to have a sense of what goes with what.
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Hyperbolic headlines always attract more attention than mundane truths.
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Sometimes I take off my skully and wear glasses, so I've gotta brush and make sure my hairline is straight.
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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.
