- Born
- Birth nameRaymond Joseph Teller
- Height5′ 9″ (1.75 m)
- Teller was born on February 14, 1948 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Penn & Teller: Bullshit! (2003), Penn & Teller Get Killed (1989) and Tim's Vermeer (2013).
- ParentsIrene B DerricksonJoseph Teller
- Never speaks while performing with Penn, and only rarely speaks when acting.
- Uses a wide variety of facial expressions to supplement not speaking.
- Receding hairline
- The shorter, silent half of Penn & Teller
- Changed his name to Teller legally, and has one of the few US passports issued with a single name.
- Driver's license reads "NFN Teller". "NFN" is short for "No First Name".
- His trademark of not speaking while on stage doing magic stems from his days doing a magic act in college. He found the audience would pay more attention to his act and not heckle or interrupt him if he did not speak.
- Despite his trademark of never speaking, Teller has appeared in speaking roles in several films and television series, including the Learning Channel's "Mysteries of Magic", in which he appeared for an interview, as himself, without stage partner Penn Jillette.
- Extremely talented painter.
- Magic is the art of creating false (but funny or beautiful) cause-and-effect relationships. That's our area of expertise. When we do it on a stage, the audience is fooled, but only for the moment, only in the theater. They know they're watching a show. They know it's all tricks. They do not go home and try to float in the air or catch bullets in their teeth. [But] When we see scam artists peddling false cause-and-effect as reality; when we see the tools of theater and poetry used to victimize the vulnerable; when we sick people submitting to "medical procedures" that belong in a Three Stooges movie; all this enrages us.
- If there existed even one psychic who had predicted that disaster, we'd be very, very interested. But, nope. What haunts me about 9/11 is the horrible knowledge that those who did the deed did it to further the divine will. Whenever we hear a politician bless killing, we should think twice.
- In real life, the most important decision you ever make is, where does reality leave off and make-believe begin? If you make a mistake about that, you're dead. You know, you're out on the street corner. You think there's no bus coming. You step out, you're dead.
- When a magician lets you notice something on your own, his lie becomes impenetrable.
- Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.
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