You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.
I think the negative reinforcement really helped me in my very beginnings.
When people say you can't do it - that it's impossible - never lose hope. Just because they couldn't doesn't mean you can't.
I am fortunate to have the resources to have many methods to do each of my illusions.
The real secret of magic lies in the performance.
I have a bunch of islands in the Bahamas that we made into this amazing, magical place. And we have these birds; they're trained to do certain things on the island, which is awesome. These toucans had a baby toucan, and the baby toucan, every hour that you'd look at this toucan, he would change.
My job is to make people dream. Of course, there's a lot of technical stuff behind the scenes and a lot of hard work behind it, but I get to watch people see the result of that hard work and feel that wonder and feel that discovery, all the time.
I don't think my playing style has really changed over the years; it's just gotten better. I can hear the improvement in comparing older records and later records. I'm referring to soloing ability, to having a better sound, to knowing chords better, and getting rhythmically stronger. It also has to do with ideas - learning how to edit your ideas and being better able to follow ideas out to a logical conclusion.
People like Johnny Depp are an exception. He is the current model of what an actor should be. His body of work speaks volumes. He was so under-rated for so long, but he will have longevity - and it is such a gratifying thrill to see he is finally getting the recognition he deserves.
As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.
If people want capital gains taxed more like the highest rate on income, that's a good discussion. Maybe that's the way to help close the deficit.