Derren Brown: Trending quotes (page 2)

“(speaking in a solemn tone to a group of young school children) Now you know that your headmistress, Miss Davis, was going to come in here and just check that you were all going to be well behaved. She can’t do that because, as many of you probably know, she can’t be here today, er, because her pants fell down earlier on. It’s not funny. If any of you see her, don’t make a fuss because it’s a bit embarrassing for her, OK? Alright? It’s not funny.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Children , School

“By a man’s boots, by his trouser knee, by his cuffs, by his coat tails, by all of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.’ Words spoken there by Sherlock Holmes, I believe… although it may have been Westlife.”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, E4 Mind Control Night

“People are always saying, “Can you use your skills to get extraordinarily beautiful women into bed?” Well… yes, yes I can.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

Women , People , Beauty

“All told, kindness is not fashionable”

Derren Brown

Books, There’s Probably No God - The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (2009)

Fashion

“In the next episode you’ll see two people draw a picture of an angel and notice when they do that they draw the angel from a particularly secular perspective. And I’m certainly not one to begin to criticise the religio-artistic viewpoint of my two charming volunteers but it does make you stop and think what spiritually vacuous times we live in when two young people instinctively draw an angel with a halo attached to the back of its head with a stick.”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, E4 Mind Control Night

People , Angels , Thinking , Time

“Paul [McKenna] and I have been working on making each other’s hair fall out for years now, with some success.”

Derren Brown

TV recordings of stage shows, Svengali (2012), Svengali tour brochure

Success

“So, what I do is a mixture of genuine psychological technique as well as all the chicanery and showmanship of the magician but it was enormously tempting to see what a clinical psychologist would make of it.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“Do you think astrologists, palm readers and the like can really tell everything about you? That your personality can be read from your birth date, your hand or from sensing vibrations? Very possible.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Birth , Thinking , Sense , Reading

“Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the extraordinary father of modern conjuring, made the salient point that ‘a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician’. This is a very good description. However, an actor takes for granted how to create drama in every word, movement and look. The average magician is barely aware of its existence.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

Parting

“I should point out that I don’t condone gambling of any sort unless you can cheat very effectively and stack the odds at least ninety percent on your favour, which is essentially what I’m doing here.”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, E4 Mind Control Night

Cheating

“How many powerful memories are triggered by smell and taste? Your mother’s old perfume, the smell your father’s breath, the taste of the soap they’d make you eat.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Memory

“Just talking about the illogicality behind so many of these systems: Tarot cards, which are obviously very, very popular. The deck is mixed and you choose a number of cards, they’re laid out and then your fortune and fate is read from them. Of course, the interesting conundrum there is that if you did the same thing five minutes later you’d pick out very different cards so presumably your fate and the reading would be necessarily very different if it’s relying on those cards. Five minutes later it would be completely different and when there have been questions about this the answer is ‘oh, that’s because your fate changes from minute to minute’. But then you have to think, presumably, to get a Tarot reading you’d have to constantly be having a Tarot reading over and over again in order to know what the accurate situation is, if it constantly changes from minute to minute.”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, The Enemies of Reason (Richard Dawkins)

Fate , Question , Thinking , Change

“Language is a gift that puts lyrics to the music of our lives. Without spoken language we wouldn’t be able to say, ‘I love you’. We’d have to say ‘uuurrrgghh’ or hold up a sign. And whether it’s one person’s gentle English or another’s muddy, arrogant French, it’s our language that makes us unapproachable and difficult to understand.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Love , Music , Understanding , Personality

“I’m here at Sandown Racecourse in Surrey. They’re expecting fifteen thousand people here today and half a million pounds to be exchanged in cash. I’m here because I’ve developed a guaranteed system for winning at the horses. This system allows me to predict twenty four hours in advance, quite openly, which horse will win in big, high profile races. Now to prove this, six weeks ago I took a woman, a random member of the public and I told her which horse was going to win in a certain race. It did win, she was intrigued. I then did it again and again and again and she started to bet larger and larger amounts of money. Now today that woman has scraped together every last penny that she can find and she’s risking it all on one final race. Is it really possible to accurately predict the winner of a horse race again and again and again? I’m going to tell you exactly how that’s done. Welcome to The System.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Derren Brown: The System (2008)

Money , People , Horse

“Remember how you used to try and make kids turn round at school by staring at the back of their heads? And how they used to go home early crying with blood coming out of their ears?”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

School , Home , Cry

“I have retained a belief that it is the popular sporty kids at school who grow up to have the least interesting lives, and the unhappy young souls who develop into the most extraordinary adults. Whoever heard of a creative genius being understood as a child and well loved by his class mates? Who like to imagine an artist who emerged into adulthood content with his lot? And, conversely, how satisfying to hear that almost without exception, the untroubled, popular kids at school have ended up blandly as accountants, solicitors or ‘in IT’. Hold on, misfits, your day will come.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

Love , School , Soul , Imagination

“The Barnum Statements are very famous and well known about and there’s a great experiment… There’s a terrific experiment that was done on this with students. I’ve filmed this myself. We did it with three different groups of people across the world, where you have… everybody in the group is given a reading, a personality reading. Normally beforehand there’s some nonsense about asking for their birth date or getting some objects off them - so there’s some sort of process apparently involved - and they’re given a reading. And it’s a long reading, it’s a very detailed personality reading and they all get one individually, they’re all asked to read it and, invariably, they will all say afterwards that it’s very, very accurate, that it was not at all vague or ambiguous or what people might expect and they’ll give it 85, 90, 95 percent accuracy. I’ve seen this happen and people are amazed by it. And then you get them to swap with each other and say “perhaps you can identify someone else by their reading”. Then they realise they’ve all been given exactly the same thing which was written months ago before I even met them and the statements that fill those sorts of readings are generally Barnum Statements. Barnum statements are things which essentially apply to anybody – this is only part of the cold-reading skill but it’s a major part of it… PT Barnum… “something for everyone” and, famously “a sucker is born every minute””

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, The Enemies of Reason (Richard Dawkins)

People , World , Birth , Reading

“For a while now I have concerned myself with engaging people’s beliefs. A large part of me wishes to have people retain a scepticism about what I do and apply that to other areas in life where our beliefs are manipulated in ugly ways.”

Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

Life , People , Way , Parting

“Some people might think I could play Russian Roulette safely with a blank bullet. Our armourer took us outside to demonstrate the damage a blank causes at close range. (The demonstration showed the significant damage caused by firing a blank at a plastic bottle)”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Derren Brown Plays Russian Roulette Live (2003)

People , Thinking

“Even though it’s dark sometimes or it’s scary for the people involved, ultimately I always make sure they’re exhilarated by it. It’s genuinely a real pleasure to take people to that place.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

People , Pleasure