Quotes by Penn Jillette

• 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.
• The medium is not the message - the message is the message.
• 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.
• We aren't people who believe that just because we're performers our opinions on everything need to be known.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 knew that we were kind of odd and creeps, and we wanted to do odd, creepy stuff for people who wanted to see that.
• 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.
• 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.
• In my private life, I'm not around any drugs or alcohol.
• If I go out to dinner with you and you order wine, I leave. I won't be around drugs and alcohol at all.
• I've never had a drink of alcohol or any drug in my life.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.