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.
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.
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.
I would always prefer - and this is something I'll never be given, it's just not practical - but I would always prefer to not have alcohol around.
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.
I'm a hardcore libertarian - I want everything legal - but I also believe that you have the right to free association.
I've never had a drink of alcohol or any drug in my life.
If I go out to dinner with you and you order wine, I leave. I won't be around drugs and alcohol at all.
In my private life, I'm not around any drugs or alcohol.
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.
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.
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.
So we have always harped on the distinction between reality and illusion, and it really isn't a political issue.
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 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.
The medium is not the message - the message is the message.
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.
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.
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.
We were first in the world to pass nine clubs. Now people are doing eleven - but at the time in the early '70s, that was a big deal.
What makes the problem really awful is that you're dealing with the entertainment industry, a group of people who are traditionally spineless.
What she doesn't realize when she talks about getting rid of television violence - I'm giving her credit for being naive, as opposed to being more cynical about it - is that violence in the arts is not a celebration of pain and suffering, but rather a celebration of health and life.
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.
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.
Yes, some of the basic ideas of our show... cooperation without compromise, which I would say is one of the major ones, is so interesting to us.
It is widely believed and reported on the Internet that Penn has prosopagnosia, a neurological impairment of the ability to remember and recognize faces.
Jillette is an avid fan of South Park, claiming that Bigger, Longer and Uncut was his favourite comedic movie. He apparently is on good terms with both Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and was cited by both as the inspiration for the controversial South Park episode Trapped in a Closet.
In July of 1999, Penn was granted U.S. Patent 5,920,923.
Penn is author of the books Sock and How to cheat your friends at poker: The wisdom of Dickie Richard.
On January 15, 2007, on Penn Radio, Jillette predicted that Columbus Day would go away or be renamed to something like "International Discovery Day" or "International Meeting Day" within twenty years.
Penn has two children. A daughter named Moxie CrimeFighter Jillette, and a son named Zolten Penn Jillette.
In 1997, Penn wrote bi-weekly dispatches for the now-defunct search engine Excite.com.
At age eighteen, he saw a show by illusionist James Randi, and became enamored of his approach to magic that openly acknowledged deception as entertainment rather than a mysterious supernatural power. Jillette regularly acknowledges Randi as the one person on the planet he loves the most besides members of his family.
In his Las Vegas show he plays the upright bass.
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