Fooling Houdini Quotes

“If there is a reason that explains the success of all the greats,” said the Spanish master Arturo De Ascanio, channeling Polonius, “it is that they have learned to know themselves and have thus been able to exploit and take advantage of their own personality.”
― Alex Stone, Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind

“Eight perfect shuffles will return a fifty-two-card deck to its original order, with every card having cycled back to its starting position.”
― Alex Stone, Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind

“Unable to think about anything but shuffling, math, and magic, I became convinced that the secrets of the universe were found inside a pack of playing cards. For starters, there’s a curious symbolism encoded in a deck of cards. There are two colors (red and black) symbolizing day and night; four suits—spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds—one for each season (or seasons of the magician's life cycle, if you like). The twelve court cards correspond to the months of the Gregorian calendar. Each suit contains thirteen cards, for the thirteen lunar cycles. There are fifty-two cards in a deck, those being the fifty-two weeks in a year. And if you add up the values of all 52 cards, including the joker, you get exactly 365. Add to this the seven shuffles and the surprising reach of the Bayer-Diaconis model—how shuffling mimics the behavior of everything from kneading dough to mixing chemicals—and cards really do start to look like cosmic instruments.”
― Alex Stone, Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind

“It’s as though gullibility is an acquired behavior, and children have not yet learned how to be deceived.”
― Alex Stone, Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind

“The biggest myth about the three-card monte is that it works because the sucker doesn’t realize it’s a scam. In fact, the monte depends on the sucker realizing it’s a scam—and then wanting in on it.”
― Alex Stone, Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind

“Deception, I came to realize, was one of the few remaining oral traditions.”
― Alex Stone, Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind

“Magicians court the spotlight while living in constant fear of exposure. They regard magic tricks as being like quantum states—destroyed by the very act of examining them up close. Magicians trumpet the secrecy of their art, almost daring the viewer to lift the veil, and yet they are furious when someone actually does.”
― Alex Stone, Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind