Presto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales

by Penn Jillette

I ate a handful of pills every morning, I was in the hospital a couple of times a year—and I still ate like a pig. I ate worse than a pig—I ate like an American.

eating nothing is the option that’s most often overlooked.

Viktor Frankl, in his essay about being a prisoner at Auschwitz, draws an analogy between suffering and gas, in that they both fill up whatever space they’re put into. He says suffering completely fills the consciousness and soul, whether the suffering is great or small.

In the United States of America, poor people are too fat! That’s amazing.

The two happiest days in a fat fuck’s life: the day he gets his CPAP and the day he gets rid of his CPAP.

It seems that most anyone can lose weight, but keeping the weight off for a couple of years is something only about 1 percent of dieters do.

If a musician is really good, you have no idea how good he or she is.

Jersey (“A Great State To Do Stupid Shit” should be their motto)—burning

I guess someone could have screamed in my face that I was a fat fuck and that being a fat fuck would kill me even faster on top of a mountain than at sea level. But no one did.

Howard Stern once told me he couldn’t get to know anyone, because he’d end up liking them and not be able to do his job. Maybe that happened with Stern and Trump, but I don’t follow either of them closely enough.

That doesn’t mean he’s right, but he sure is wicked thin and very healthy, and you’re better off taking diet advice from a thin, healthy fuck than from a fat fuck.

I do not like moderation.

Topless grown-up Vegas women and a bowl of bacon beat the seventy-two virgin houris vaguely and falsely promised to religious murderers hands down, even without the lap dance. I got strippers and bacon; the murderers just died.

You could put in too much onion and lose a round, but two sticks of butter per serving were fine.

He told them to view the feeling in their stomachs not as hunger but as the burning of fat.

there’s a difference between the way you need China white and the way you need air, even though it doesn’t feel that way.

I’ve always thought it was amazing that hippies would take drugs manufactured and distributed by a stranger but were so wary of drug companies.

The stuff that I really didn’t like—killing people, taking away liberties, and giving money to rich people—Obama, Bush, and Clinton agreed on completely.