Christopher Priest Quotes

“My passion is equal to the task.”

“The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary.”

“Now you’re looking for the secret... but you wont find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.”

“An illusion has three stages. First there is the setup, in which the nature of what might be attempted at is hinted at, or suggested, or explained.”

“The performance is where the magician’s lifetime of practice, and his innate skill as a performer, co-join to produce the magical display.”

“Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.”

“In the expression of grief lies recovery from grief itself.”

“I planned to waste away and die, but there is a spirit of life, even in one such as myself, that stands in the way of such decisions. ”

“I thought that if I did not eat and drink then death would simply follow, but in practice I found that thirst becomes such a frantic obsession that it takes a greater resolve than mine to resist it.”

“Every time I took a few drops to slake it, I postponed my demise a little more. The same was true with food. Hunger is a monster.”

“After a while I came to an accommodation with this and stayed alive, a pathetic denizen of a half-world that was as much of my own making as it had been of Borden’s, or so I came to believe. I went through the winter in this miserable state, a failure even at self-destruction.”

“Volunteers from the audience sometimes participate in preparation. As the trick is being setup, the magician will make use of every possible use of misdirection.”

“The third stage is sometimes called the effect, or the prestige, and this is the product of magic. If a rabbit is pulled from a hat, the rabbit, which apparently did not exist before the trick was performed, can be said to be the prestige of that trick.”

“The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret... but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know.”

“Are you watching closely?”

“You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”.”

“When once before I wished myself dead, the wish was not strong enough. I can make myself die only by convincing myself that there is also a hope I shall not succeed.”

“Well some days it’s not true. Maybe today you’re more in love with magic. I like being able to tell the difference, it makes the days it is true mean something.”

“He came in to demand an answer and I told him the truth. That I have fought with myself over that night, one half of me swearing blind that I tied a simple slipknot, the other half convinced that I tied the Langford double. I can never know for sure.”

“No one cares about the man in the box, the man who disappears.”

“You never understood, why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special... you really don’t know?... it was... it was the look on their faces..”.