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Derren Brown Quotes
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Derren Brown is an English mentalist, illusionist, and author. Since his television debut with Derren Brown: Mind Control in 2000, Brown has produced several other shows for the stage and television in both series and specials. His 2006 stage show Something Wicked This Way Comes and his 2012 show Svengali won him two Laurence Olivier Awards for Best Entertainment. He made his Broadway debut with his 2019 stage show Secret. He has also written books for magicians as well as the general public.

Brown does not claim to possess any supernatural powers and his acts are often designed to expose the methods of those who do assert such claims, such as faith healers and mediums. In his performances, he often says that his effects are achieved through "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection, and showmanship". Wikipedia  

✵ 27. February 1971
Derren Brown photo
Derren Brown: 136   quotes 0   likes

Derren Brown Quotes

“I’m going to teach them some genuine skills that I use, peppered with some spurious pop-psychology and quite a lot of bullshit.”

Derren Brown

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

“Animals can also be ‘hypnotised’. Flip a rabbit on its back, hold it firmly in position with its head back for a couple of minutes, and you’ll find it will become perfectly motionless and unresponsive, until you clap your hands loudly above its head.”

Derren Brown

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

Animals

“Canterbury Cathedral: The first ever pocket watch was found in the walls of its cloister many hundreds of years ago. I decided to come, in the rain, to play with the locals and, if time permitted, attend the evening service.”

Derren Brown

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

Time

“This week, we’re in Whitby on the North-east coast where my great-uncle, Count Dracula, first touched British soil in the shape of a big dog.”

Derren Brown

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

Dogs

“Some athletes use the mind to try and improve stamina and strength. Can I use my mind to take it away?”

Derren Brown

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

“Russian Roulette should not, under any circumstances, be copied. It is extremely dangerous.”

Derren Brown

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

“I have had no formal training in painting: I gave up Art A level because I was sick of drawing peppers.”

Derren Brown

Books, Portraits (2009)

Art , Drawing , Painting , Training

“In 1957, James Vicary, a market researcher, conducted a six week test in a New Jersey movie theatre. A high-speed projector repeatedly and subliminally flashed the slogans ‘drink Coke’ and ‘eat popcorn’ over the film. I thought I’d make my own cinema ad to try something similar. According to Vicary, popcorn sales went up by 57.5% and Coke sales by 18.1%… Whether Vicary’s results were due to the subliminals can never be shown and the experiment has become shrouded in urban myth. This is the Genesis Cinema in East London, which kindly agreed to include our ad amongst the trailers for a screening of Ocean's Twelve, a carefully chosen film which, if the ad works, the audience will not be able to remember. Not a bad thing.”

Derren Brown

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

Drink , Speed

“It’s Derren Brown, it’s Derren Brown, it’s Derren Brown, it’s Derren Brown. He’s very kind, he’ll read your mind, even if you’re blind, your thoughts he’ll find”

Derren Brown

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

Reading

“I like my parrot, Figaro. Not in a wrong way – I mean, yes, he’ll do anything for a mouth full of seed but nothing tacky.”

Derren Brown

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

Way

“Any form of card-case, beyond the most battered and unassuming, is surely an aesthetic and social travesty. To withdraw, say, a silver case from the pocket before removing a card is surely to trumpet a ludicrous gaucheness and maladroit pretension. It is impossible for the intended recipient of the card to view the case as anything other than a misjudged piece of peacockery; unfeasible to avoid a brief inner commentary along the lines of oh, he’s bought one of those… he decided this would make the act of handing over a card a signal of his success as a businessman and a certain refined elegance as a gentleman… probably picked it out himself… please God it was a Father’s Day gift from a child who knew no better.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

God , Success

“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

Football , Cry

“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)

People , World , Fraud , Sister

“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)

Personality

“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)

Way , Boy , Idea , Problem

“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)

People , Way , History , Thinking

“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

Memory

“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)

Pleasure , Lie , Question , Sense

“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)

Question , Reading

“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)

World , Food

“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

People , Game , Reading

“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)

Problem

“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)

Age , Communication , Thinking

“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)

Truth , Faith , Fools , Feeling

“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)

Money , People , Feeling , Business

“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)

Understanding , Strong , Hockey

“(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)

Beauty , Past

“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

Time , Night

“Every day when you leave your home you give away more than you could ever imagine about who you are and what you do.”

Derren Brown

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

Home , Imagination

“Now for Heaven’s sake go to bed. Don’t worry about how it was done just go straight to bed. Leave the washing-up and get into bed fully clothed. If any of you want to know how any of it was done, please feel free to write in to me at my home address which will come up on the screen in a moment and I will give you a full and honest explanation of anything you may ask.”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, E4 Mind Control Night

Feeling , Home , Clothes

“I had to get up at five in the morning to push that man around the market and the only reason why I do this job, my only motivation, is that I don't have to get up early - and I didn't even get a free apple. Bastards.”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, E4 Mind Control Night

Motivation

“I hated sports at school and hated my sports teachers. Still do in fact - especially Mr Broomfield. He remains an insult to retarded, overbearing megalomaniacs to this day.”

Derren Brown

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

Hate , School , Sport , Teachers

“I remember reading about a story about a guy – and this was in England, and no more than a couple of years ago. He’d gone to see a psychic, and was told there was a curse on his family, and in order to release the curse, he had to bring with him the following week £5,000 and burn it… if he didn’t do that, either he or his son would die. The scam is quite a common one – the money is put in an envelope, and apparently burnt, but of course the ‘psychic’ secretly switches the envelope and burns an envelope full of newspaper. What happened was the guy went away, and he knew he couldn’t raise £5000, but didn’t want his son to die; so he killed himself.”

Derren Brown

TV recordings of stage shows, Something Wicked This Way Comes (2006), Something Wicked This Way Comes tour brochure

Money , Family , Guy , Reading

“I don’t believe in spiritualism. Personally, I find it quite ugly.”

Derren Brown

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

Personality

“Science is unusual in that it is cumulative. It is a system built over time, wherein useful information is retained and ideas that simply don't stand up are discarded, based on the confirmation of knowledge through testing.”

Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

Idea , Knowledge , Science , Time

“I am embarrassingly incompetent at football or any kind of team sport. I’m so bad it would anger you.”

Derren Brown

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

Sport , Football , Anger

“(In answer to the question ‘Were you at all scared of Chris Ryan?’) I wasn’t scared of Chris Ryan although I was a little bit put off by his white jeans. As a straight man that’s been in the SAS I found that surprising and it did throw me a little bit..”

Derren Brown

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

Question

“The most cursory look at cold-reading and suggestion tells us that Tarot cards are not evil; psychics do not ‘usher in’ the Devil or his minions; and even the creepy old Ouija board can be shown to operate via quite everyday, natural, physical forces.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

Nature , Evil , Reading

“Few things make me more livid than insulting bad theatre of any sort. Conversely, perfectly realised and exquisitely elegant performance can move me deeply and reduce me to sobbing like a big girl.”

Derren Brown

Books, Absolute Magic - A Model for Powerful Close-Up Performance (2003) second edition

Girl

“If you have never been to a live show of mine, then expect almost a full hour of great songs interspersed with hilarious anecdotes about my career, and lengthy clips from my embarrassingly successful channel 4 television shows.”

Derren Brown

TV recordings of stage shows, Derren Brown – Enigma (2011), Derren Brown – Enigma tour brochure

Success

“Memory tricks, amongst other things which I’ll show you, have got me banned from a lot of Casinos in this country.”

Derren Brown

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

Memory , Country

“In magic, anyone with a shop-bought trick deck is a magician, and if people aren’t fooled they usually pretend to be, and they are understandably likely to mistake being fooled as a sign of being in the presence of an excellent magician.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

People , Fools , Understanding

“Under British law, you’re not allowed to fire a live round unless you are a qualified armourer. This is why the live game has to take place overseas.”

Derren Brown

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

Law , Game

“Moderate religious people may of course express distaste for such violence, pretending that the clear calls for grotesque and violent behaviour in their sacred book aren't there and cherry-picking the 'nice bits', but they are still guilty of not opening up the subject of belief to rational discourse, and in doing so are part of the machinery that leads to all the ugliness caused by fundamentalism.”

Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

People , Books , Parting

“There is a common response from people when they hear that in the absence of evidence to convince me otherwise I don’t have any particular belief in ghosts, psychic powers or an afterlife. It normally runs something along the lines of ‘So you think we just live, die and that’s it? Come on…’ There’s a clear implication there that this earthly life – the wonder of being human – is somehow worthless. That it’s cheap and disappointing enough to warrant that ‘just’ and the accompanying incredulous tone, which are usually reserved for sentences like ‘After all that it was just a little spider? Come on…’ I live, I am sure, in a fairly narrow band of life, and make an embarrassingly pitiful attempt to explore the world I find myself upon. I ache with guilt and conflict when I hear of people living as adventurers, abandoning mainstream lives and living each day with abandon. But I really hope I have a brighter vision for this life and a greater curiosity for its richness than one who can say, and mean, ‘You think we just live, die and that’s it?”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

Life , People , World , Hope

“Every week we go to the supermarket and every week we allow ourselves to be manipulated by the packaging and layout of the goods.”

Derren Brown

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

“Performing the magic, for me, is not about convincing anyone I have amazing abilities. It’s about providing a journey which comes to a place where the brain starts spinning. And of course, the best brains spin the most.”

Derren Brown

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

“What makes us dream of some things and not others? Why might we pick up on a trivial event from the day and not something more important? Would it be possible to have someone dream of specific subjects by subtly suggesting those ideas?”

Derren Brown

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

Dreams , Idea

“Music is arguably the most affecting of the arts; intelligible to all people yet untranslatable into any other idiom. To Schopenhauer it was a direct expression of the ‘world will’… and was good when he had guests over.”

Derren Brown

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

People , World , Art , Music