Derren Brown Quotes

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Derren Brown

Profession : Entertainer

Birth : February 27, 1971

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.

Derren Brown

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.

Derren Brown

If you aim to be controversial for the sake of it you'd end up with a very thin and meaningless show.

Derren Brown

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.

Derren Brown

In terms of self-esteem and confidence I think I'm generally quite healthy.

Derren Brown

And the nature of magic is all in the person's experience. Whether the magician is using a highly complex sleight of hand or he's just got two cards that are the same, it doesn't matter: it's how it's sold and how magical it is for the person that matters.

Derren Brown

A magic trick of any sort works because you tell yourself a story about what you see. And politicians use this all the time in their own way by throwing a load of statistics at you when things don't quite follow and then saying, 'So therefore blah,' and you believe that 'blah' thing because of the confusion that's come before.

Derren Brown

Hypnosis is just suggestibility; you see it in certain people.

Derren Brown

Magic has both feet planted in cheap vaudeville and childish posturing; in dishonesty and therefore not in art.

Derren Brown

Sometimes you need to be aware of the bigger picture you are missing.

Derren Brown

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.

Derren Brown

The process of coming out is normally very disappointing. It's not that people react badly to it - they really don't care.

Derren Brown

The big, fun, ambitious ideas tend to come out of the frustration of talking for too long about the smaller, weaselly ones.

Derren Brown

In real life, when I can avoid anything stressful, I do.

Derren Brown

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.

Derren Brown

I do always look back and feel faintly embarrassed by anything I've done in the past. I think that's not a terrible thing, because if you don't do that, how are you growing and moving forward?

Derren Brown

When you're with your partner, I think, does everyone else sing and do the stupid voices and all that stuff that I do and always have done?

Derren Brown

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.

Derren Brown

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.

Derren Brown

Taking up magic was a distraction from my sexuality. There is that 1970s cliche of the gay man as hairdresser, interior decorator, fashionista... and all of those things are about arranging surfaces in a very dazzling way - and magic is all about how you arrange surfaces. I got very good at deflecting people from things I didn't want them to see.

Derren Brown