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.

For every moment of concentration there is an equal moment of relaxation.

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.

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

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

The people who are most susceptible to hypnosis - the rugger bugger types - were also the ones who intimidated me most at school, so on an unconscious level I suppose I'm turning the tables on them.

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.

I've got a house full of taxidermy. It's like a museum. I have about 200 pieces in total, all ethically sourced.

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.

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

Sexuality is often tied in with something you feel you lack in yourself and look for in others.

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.

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.

I have a couple of dogs and I live with my partner. We just like to sit and read and I'm generally quite quiet.

Kindness and compassion aren't political qualities even though they get politicized.

I'm finally having my TV removed and replaced by a tropical fish tank, which I hope will provide more interesting viewing.

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.

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.

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.

I had a natural aptitude for wanting to be the centre of attention and a definite skill for annoying people.

It's a controlling thing on stage - you're directing the action, getting people to play their role. In real life, I take being kind and nice seriously, so the last thing I'd ever want to be is that weird, controlling, manipulative character.

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

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.

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.

I don't like big spiders in the house.

Yes, I've had a slight feeling of wanting to reclaim some of the lifestyle I had in my 20s, which means poncing around in what amounts to pirate clothes.

So I don't really suffer too badly from fears - I'm quite happy to engender them in other people though!

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

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.

That was how I started, as a hypnotist. But I didn't like the kind of gigs I was being offered. I didn't want to embarrass people.

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?

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?

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.

I was a Christian when I was young and didn't know any better.

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.

Magic's quite a solitary pursuit - a thing you can do for hours and hours, getting better and better.

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.

If people have very big personalities, I find myself feeling I have nothing to offer.

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.

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 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.

If you do magic, it's the quickest most fraudulent route to impressing people.

The stuff that I do and enjoy is normally quite similar to a lot of the stuff that psychics and spiritualists would enjoy themselves. I just have a different approach to wanting to find out how things really work, or a sense of, I guess, responsibility about honesty and so on.

People are just passively accepting what you tell them, so if you are on TV there is that greater responsibility to be true.

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.

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.

A bedrock of insecurity made me want to impress and want to be the center of attention.

I wasn't terribly sociable. I had two or three friends at school. I drew things, played with Lego. My parents left me free to do whatever made me happy.

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.