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

by Penn Jillette

I will die, like many Americans will, as a result of spending most of my life being a fat fuck.

Shakespeare and Call of Duty are able to thrill people and celebrate life without anyone getting hurt.

Fire eating is done by combining a working sense of physics and human physiology with a natural lack of common sense.

It was time to turn my health to rock-’n’-roll-free-jazz-beat-poetry-outlaw-transgressive-comedy performance art, and that’s something I can do.

Potatoes are just a ‘fuck you’ to the paleo people. They have some stuff right, but they’re wrong about so much more.”

Someone has always covered everything I’ve thought before, but I don’t like to think about that.

Real American exceptionalism is simply thinking we’re exceptional.

As Neil Young sang, “It’s hard enough losing without the confusion of knowing I tried.”

My favorite living author is Nicholson Baker. I just love every single thing he writes. He breaks my heart, teaches me, scares me, makes me laugh, and gives me a joyful, bitter, sad, glorious reason to live. He’s the best. In his first book, The Mezzanine,

We decided that Goudeau and Penn would eat nothing but potatoes for two weeks starting at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, December 9. CrayRay gave us a lot of other rules. We were supposed to sleep a lot. We had to allow ourselves to be cold. And we were not to exercise.

Diets are like Christianity: they are set up so that you can never be sure you’re doing everything right. It’s your fault.

I’m such a hard-core atheist that I don’t even believe churches were created. I think even they evolved. That’s how atheist I am.

This is why exercise feels great: because exercise burns mostly glycogen and not much fat. Exercise just made room for my next starchy/sugary meal to be stuffed away for later.