Quotes About Sleight-of-hand

If you want to talk about magic, the stuff that blows me away is the stuff that's done close up.

I suppose that if I could only do one thing, a solid card effect would be pretty high on the list. That's the root of it all, sleight-of-hand. It's certainly the thing I feel most comfortable with.

The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight-of-hand that was ever invented.

I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left...

As a general rule, these sleight-of-hand tricks are a dead give-away to the murderer once you've tumbled to the means of workin' the illusion. A special sort of crime indicates a special set of circumstances, and those circumstances narrow down to fit one person like a hangman's cap when you know what they are.

In the winters, I enrolled in the hotel management program at Cornell University. I naively thought that I knew something about sleight-of-hand, entertainment and food, and that would be all I needed.

Usually I'll tell someone, for example, like their watch. If they have a watch on, I might say, 'In three minutes, I'd like to be wearing your watch. Do I have your permission?' Once they say yes, I play a little game with them as I'm interacting with them, and I steal their watch.

You can't tell the politicians from the magicians, if you know what I mean," and he flicked an imaginary cigar and flexed his eyebrows.

Instead of finding new ways to support innovation and investment while achieving short-term goals, they fall back on the same old strategies, policies, and procedures, relying on accounting sleight-of-hand to make it all work.

Like a stage magician, the con artist misdirects suspicion. While everyone's watching for him to pull a rabbit out of a hat, he's actually sawing a girl in half. You think he's doing one trick when he's actually doing another. You think that I'm dying, but I'm laughing at you.