Words matter. These are the best Derren Brown Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When touring I get to travel around with my best friends, do a show I love and I’m confident people will enjoy, and have all the adrenalin that comes with performing.
I had no sense of ‘Gotta work hard to be famous.’ Never have done, and still don’t.
I was in Leeds, just starting out, and I was hypnotising one person up on stage. Suddenly I had members of the crowd unsuspectingly go to sleep on me as well.
What I do is rooted in magic – it’s got a big foot planted firmly in conjuring, even if the other foot’s planted in psychological techniques.
I like to eat other people’s food in restaurants.
I’m probably a little shyer than people imagine.
We go through life owned by the stories we tell ourselves which are often historic and charged narratives – things we’ve learnt since childhood that we don’t even consciously realise are going on.
I never quite know how to describe what I do. I normally just say, ‘Oh, I’m a magician’, which probably puts fairly naff ideas in people’s minds but is pleasantly conversation-stopping.
If people have very big personalities, I find myself feeling I have nothing to offer.
I’m probably more persuasive than the next person if I want to be, but do I want to be? In my head, I just don’t go there.
For a long time, I couldn’t just sit and have a conversation with people at a table without showing them a trick. I thought you just had to impress, it was about impressing, which of course is what you do if you don’t feel very impressive.
I think you can be sceptical, and still do things that are in a joyful way, and ultimately you are on stage entertaining. If you let your philosophy get too much in the way of that, then you are failing as an entertainer.
The process of coming out is normally very disappointing. It’s not that people react badly to it – they really don’t care.
I’ll sometimes go a week or two without tweeting, and then when I’m in the mood, tweet loads, and clog up people’s in-boxes. It’s a moment when you feel like sharing something.
A bedrock of insecurity made me want to impress and want to be the center of attention.
In my 20s, I just had to be the centre of attention all the time. I was quite eccentric.
As a performer you often feel that you’re the child and everyone else is a grown-up.
I’ve got a house full of taxidermy. It’s like a museum. I have about 200 pieces in total, all ethically sourced.
Being gay facilitated my capacity for shame. As a child, I carried around this thing that gradually became this big dark secret. When I came out in a newspaper interview at 30 I was expecting the reaction the following day to be like the climax of ‘Dead Poets Society,’ but actually no one really cared.
I wore a cloak for many years, I had long hair, I may have had a drop earring for a week and I fancied myself as a philosopher poet but was somewhere more in the gay female leisure pirate.
Kindness and compassion aren’t political qualities even though they get politicized.
Things I’ve done in the past always make me cringe a bit. When I think back to being a Christian. Proselytising to people, that makes me cringe.
I’m not very sociable. If I get invited to a glamorous event I probably won’t go. That world does not really appeal to me.
I’m finally having my TV removed and replaced by a tropical fish tank, which I hope will provide more interesting viewing.
I remember Doritos launched a new flavour and the question was whether I could use my skills – as they perceived them – to make people desire and want to try this new flavour. But I like to be in control of the things I do and feel proud of them.
Since turning 40 I happily moisturise – I have what’s called a regime – but I’m always in two minds because I have no idea if I’m completely wasting my money. They feel nice when they are on but I can’t stop wondering, ‘Am I succumbing to the same nonsense I try to fight against in other areas?’
I like films that sort of play out in one confined area. Films that have a feeling that you’re watching a play, a contained environment and a creeping tension.
I was allowed to do whatever made me happy. I can’t think of a better or more worthwhile approach to parenting.
In terms of self-esteem and confidence I think I’m generally quite healthy.
I have got friends that I have got to know and found out that, the first few times I was with them, they were just thinking that everything I was doing was some kind of weird mind game, which is hysterical, really, because I couldn’t be any less like that.
Feeling we have to be constantly updated about the lives of our friends and that everything we say has to be out there leads to frustration, anger and jealousy much more than it leads to anything else.
Hypnosis is just suggestibility; you see it in certain people.
In recent years there’s been a lot of philosophical theorising about how important magic is, and how it takes us back to a childlike state of astonishment. I think all this is just nonsense. Magic isn’t meaningful or important other than how you’re performing it in that moment.
I love touring, more than anything. Doing the stage show is a more enjoyable process than TV. There are no safeguards but the payoff is the wow factor.
It used to frustrate me when I’d get celebrities on my shows and I had to meet them as this ludicrous magician character rather than as myself.
If you’re a comedian, it’s a bit of a choice whether or not you want to be funny when you’re not performing because it might feel disingenuous. In the same way, I don’t show people magic tricks in social situations any more.
Suggestibility is a very loose term. You may not be the sort of person who responds well to a hypnotist on stage, but you might find, for example, that a doctor administering a placebo to you is something you respond well to.
Magic, whether it’s mind magic or conjuring, is about the cheapest and quickest way of impressing people, and I think if you don’t grow out of that as a magician then it shows, and people get a bit sick of that after a while, because it starts to feel like posturing. So I grew out of it.
Sexuality is often tied in with something you feel you lack in yourself and look for in others.
When you’re made to be frightened within a safe context, like watching a horror film, you have that tension/release which triggers all those happy chemicals that feel good.
When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn’t ordinarily do.
Mentalist is the technical term for what I do and it covers everything from psychic medium through Uri Geller, through to magicians doing tricks with a mental theme.
Relationships are very good at making you more conscious of yourself. Especially as you get older, you develop a crust around your madnesses and shortcomings that take someone else to recognize them.
You have to realise that hypnosis doesn’t exist: it just works on people’s natural suggestibility, their expectations and capacity to unconsciously role play. You can’t make someone do anything they don’t want to do.
Magic’s quite a solitary pursuit – a thing you can do for hours and hours, getting better and better.
Clearly if a hypnotist could make someone to steal £100k just by telling them to, the world would be a different place, and I suspect that hypnotists wouldn’t bother doing shows in pubs or dodgy Spanish holiday resorts.
I’m a British psychological illusionist, which is a term I made up, but I do these kind of mind-reading and psychological experiments. There’s nothing magical about it at all.
Glenn Close is my favourite actress and she came to see the show in London once which was giddying.
I think the sheer hell of trying to get a film made; I don’t know if it would ultimately be worth it. The sort of format that I have, these TV things, sit somewhere between documentaries and reality shows and entertainment shows and dramas.
I had a natural aptitude for wanting to be the centre of attention and a definite skill for annoying people.
I was part of a very uncool group. It was a group that liked classical music. They were known as the Music School Gang or, less charitably, the Poof Gang.
A lot of unconfident kids do tricks because it’s the quickest route to impressing people. You can stand behind something amazing and people think you’re amazing.
That’s how I lived for 10 years in Bristol after graduating. I just stayed in my student flat and paid very little rent. It was lovely, and part of me still misses that very lazy lifestyle. I was known as the magician on the street, and I used to dress a little eccentrically in a cloak.
There’s something a bit embarrassing about saying you’re a magician. It immediately suggests all these horrendous cliches, let alone that you’re a grown-up doing a child’s job.
When I was at University I had a sort of fear about going to the gym and that kind of blokeish environment, which was rooted in a feeling of total inadequacy, which is what fear is.
Most people’s fear of being in front of an audience can generally be conquered by being completely on top of what it is they’ve got to do.
The Stoics appear during a huge time of constant wars and real political strife. And it became very popular, I think, because it’s a way of distancing yourself from strife and keeping your centre of gravity within you.
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