Parenting & Family Quote by Ian Hart

A joke that flatters the listener while quietly admitting the world is still run on make-believe. Ian Hart's line, "Well, put it like this, if you're not a kid, you're a wizard", works because it treats adulthood not as a graduation from fantasy, but as a higher-level version of it. Kids get permission to believe in impossible things; adults have to manufacture the permission themselves. The punch is the reframe: maturity isn't sobriety, it's craft.

Hart, an actor whose career has often lived inside other people's skins, is basically describing performance as a life skill. The "wizard" isn't a literal sorcerer; it's anyone who can conjure wonder on command - for an audience, for a family, or just for themselves on a bleak Tuesday. The intent is light and disarming, the kind of quip you can throw into an interview, but the subtext is pointed: we admire innocence, yet we reward the ability to simulate it. Childhood imagination is spontaneous; adult imagination becomes work, technique, and sometimes survival.

Culturally, it lands in a post-Harry Potter, franchise-soaked era where "magic" is both entertainment and branding. Calling adults "wizards" is also a small rebellion against the idea that being grown means being grim. It's a wink at everyone sustaining the illusion - artists, parents, optimists, liars - suggesting the real divide isn't age, it's whether you can still make the world feel charged with possibility.