Penn Jillette Quotes (45 Quotes)

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.

This film has more affection and love and world peace in it than any Disney film ever made, ... This is a truly feel-good movie about (an unprintable family activity).

We know that the holidays are a hard time for UBS and blood (supplies) are low, so we thought it was the least we could,

It's be-bop, improvisation, ... You get to see different actors do Shakespeare, or jazz musicians do versions of the same song. Why not comedians.

Provenza transcribed every minute of those hours on a computer. That allowed him to manipulate the information in his head, very much like Mozart, I would think,

Janet Reno, during her confirmation hearings, said she would come down harder on porno, and lately she's talked about how violence on television has an effect on violence in the real world.

And we realized it was time to do a show underwater. Magic needs a good head-soaking.

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.

very puritanical parents in western Massachusetts. If my dad stubbed his toe, you might get 'hell' out of him.

It's really not good, ... I mean, when I talked to Siegfried last night, he said, you know, it was going to be OK. You have no idea what that means. It means a friend that he's loved dearly and worked with for 28 years -- his heart's still beating, and there's still hope.

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.

We don't have a master plan. Madonna has a master plan. I think 50 Cent has a master plan ... We don't.

The first year, I went off half-cocked, which is nothing new for me. The last two years have been better-planned.

The negative side so far has been predominantly nut-bags - Christian Web sites and a guy from a theater chain who wanted to get his name in the paper, who I don't think even saw the movie, but saw a press opportunity,

Five years ago, I was in New York, and I saw Elvis Costello and I said, 'I look forward to seeing you in Vegas,

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.

We would sit and drink decaffeinated coffee and discuss things. Always pretentiously.

In my private life, I'm not around any drugs or alcohol.

If there is room for Chris Bliss and there is, there's also room for Jason Garfield to make fun of him.

It's a business partnership. And I think we do better stuff together than we do separately. It's very easy we have the same values and morality. ... I think the nice thing is we care about the show more than we care about each other.

The medium is not the message - the message is the message.

It's an idea we'd had for 15 years. But the technology did not catch up with us until the last couple of years, when we could have enough cameras safely enough underwater that it would look as great as we thought it would.

It kind of makes me feel great, because words still have power, ... I just like how uplifting the idea is Words are powerful.

I think it was Laurence Olivier who said that one of the things you have to accept in art is that when you put your heart into doing something there will be people who don't like it for really good reasons, really smart people who don't like what you've done for very valid reasons. That is hard to accept, that there are really valid reasons for not liking anything. The astonishing thing is that there haven't been many valid reasons for anyone not to like this movie.

Every nut who kills people has a Bible lying around. If you're looking for violent rape imagery, the Bible's right there in your hotel room. If you just want to look up ways to screw people up, there it is, and you're justified because God told you to.

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.

You donate blood, you save a life and you get to see our stupid show,

I've never had a drink of alcohol or any drug in my life.

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.

Teller and I worked Renaissance Festivals and street performing - actually more real, no kidding around, Philadelphia street performing than we did Renaissance Festivals.

The fact is that violence gives you a rush.

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.

It's the house of a 12-year-old with a lot of money.

We aren't people who believe that just because we're performers our opinions on everything need to be known.

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.

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.

Poker has the feeling of a sport but you don't have to do push-ups, ... How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker The Wisdom of Dickie Richmond.

Working in television, you really need a composer who can work in many styles especially when you're working in comedy. Stockdale can do anything.

If I go out to dinner with you and you order wine, I leave. I won't be around drugs and alcohol at all.

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.

For us to make any sort of statement that our artistic expression is being trounced would be self-serving, unpleasant and not true.

I have never heard her say 'hell' or 'damn,' ... She's not coming.

The whole thing comes from Provenza and I talking about be-bop jazz about five years ago when I got obsessed with it, and still am,

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.