Derren Brown: Trending quotes

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“If you concern yourself with telling or showing people how interesting you are, you will at best provoke a temporary response of polite interest until even that gives way to annoyance. If you let people find it out for themselves, you become a real source of fascination.”

Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

“There are people who have the ability to wake up a minute or even seconds before their alarm goes off or to know what time they’ve woken up without even looking at a clock. Now, thank God, I don’t have to get up in the mornings but the potential of the body to keep such accurate time is remarkable.”

Derren Brown

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

“I can’t drive, play football without crying, or successfully use a PS3 controller.”

Derren Brown

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

“Séances date back to the 1800s after three sisters by the name of Fox claimed to be able to contact the dead. They toured America with their demonstrations and attracted the rich and famous and by the end of the century séances had taken off all over the western world. Spirits were manifested, tambourines flew, ectoplasm impossibly erupted from entranced mediums. Then, after forty years of this, rather embarrassed by what they’d started, one of the sisters, Margaret Fox, confessed that they were frauds. The miracles which had started it all off had been a scam. But her confession made very little difference and spiritualism continues to appeal to many people today.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Derren Brown: Séance (2004)

“In each episode of this series I will offer an applicant a blind choice of either a pleasant experience, a ‘treat’, or a darker ‘trick’. They won’t know which one they’ve chosen and they may not know how or when it will happen to them.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick or Treat (2007–2008)

“In Victorian criminology there was an enthusiasm for spotting criminal tendencies in a person’s features.”

Derren Brown

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

“The interest in Lego may have come later. Certainly the grown-up Technic variant, with it gears and cogs and motors, fascinated me the most, and presumably some way into adolescence, as I remember constructing a colourful mechanical Wanking Machine during long periods upstairs in my room. The inevitable problem of round pegs and square holes sadly rendered this particular project fruitless, on many levels, but the manufacturers might like to take note of the idea when planning other themed kits for their teenage boy demographic.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

“History is littered with examples of normal people being persuaded to act in deviant, criminal or irrational ways. How do you persuade someone to do something they would not normally be prepared to do? Some people might think of hypnosis. However, hypnosis isn’t really what it appears to be. It’s only a kind of play acting and no one would carry out an instruction to really commit a robbery any more than they’d murder someone if they were told to.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Derren Brown: The Heist (2006)

“One of the techniques that I use to imitate psychic phenomena is photographic memory.”

Derren Brown

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

“The balls, the chutzpah, the gall, nerve and impudence of the successful lie that is huge enough never to be questioned is always a source of immense professional pleasure amongst magicians with any sense of the theatrical.”

Derren Brown

Books, Harry Houdini on Deception (foreword) (2009)

“From psychics to spiritualists to palm readers to graphologists to astrologists, the ‘expert’ in question either just simply deluded and naive or they’re using a skill called cold-reading.”

Derren Brown

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

“Vienna. It means nothing to me but to Orson Welles, it was the setting for one of his finest performances - and a place to get huge plates of cheap rich food. I followed the footsteps of my hero, which are still visible in the concrete, to the world famous Ferris wheel.”

Derren Brown

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

“My techniques are concerned with reading signals from people, tiny unconscious clues that betray their thoughts. I tend to see it like a game…”

Derren Brown

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

“The potential for self-loathing comes from the unavoidable problem that one is engaging in a childish, fraudulent activity: although it has the capacity to delight and amaze, the performer is also a hair’s breadth from being justifiably treated like a silly child. It is, after all, just tricks.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

“We all get stuck in our belief systems, however sensible we think they are. To me, the New Age community is particularly guilty of not testing or challenging what it claims.”

Derren Brown

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

“It seems silly and churlish to attack others for their private beliefs, unless one is entirely convinced of the greater view that harm is caused by the persistence of that belief in society; but when pressed into engaging on the matter, I recall the question I asked myself many times until I found my own faith breaking down: Bearing in mind we can all utterly convince ourselves of things that are not true – and that therefore important truths about the universe must surely always be based on more solid foundations than what my easily fooled, fickle feelings tell me – what is it that supports this belief other than my own already-existing conviction?”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

“A lot of the justification psychics give is that ‘well, it comforts people’ and my feeling on that is, well, if they’re lies, who are you to decide that your lies are what people need to hear to comfort them. I think it’s a twisted logic. And I think that the reasons… if you’ve lost somebody dear to you and I’m trampling all over those memories telling you that they’re here now saying this and that, that’s none of my business. And if I’m just doing it because I can earn some money out of it… and when you watch these people at work so much of it is ego. Some of mediums at these spiritualist churches – especially the ones that aren’t so good – they just look like second rate stage hypnotists that you might see in a pub in Corfu. It’s horrendous. That I find really quite ugly.”

Derren Brown

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

“Uninformed strong opinions - and I particularly include religious ones, which for some reason get special treatment - are of course mere clusters of prejudices and no more appropriate than mine, yours or anyone else's are on topics we don't understand - as worthless as my opinions on hockey, Noel Edmonds or rimming.”

Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

“(Whilst having his makeup done) This is the makeup process. I’ve been here since half past five this morning. So would you say you’re bringing out a beauty that’s already there? How does it work? How do we hide the bald patch?”

Derren Brown

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

“Hello and welcome to Mind Control Night. Three hours of watching my smug balding head so make sure you have plenty of night time snacks, depilatory cream and really good drugs to hand.”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, E4 Mind Control Night