"In the winters, I enrolled in the hotel management program at Cornell University. I naively thought ..." — Ricky Jay

I'm much more interested in lesser-known eccentrics and characters and performers. Like Matthew Buchinger, who was born in Germany in 1674, had no arms or legs and yet did magic, and had 14 kids, and made the most extraordinary calligraphy.

Theft annoys me more than anything else. The purloining of effects from another magician. Some people think it's massive to steal the secrets of nuclear reactors, but to steal a card move is trivial. They're wrong.

I think the toughest thing about being an actor in a film is to be with a director who doesn't know what they want. And that can be really, really frustrating.

That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.