QUOTES by Derren Brown
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
People often think that you get the most of everything from having your face on the screen but its really, like musicians, when you hit the road. It's also where the most fun is, the adrenaline of it every night, giving this incredibly well rehearsed charismatic version of yourself every night and people hopefully loving you.
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I think the sheer hell of trying to get a film made; I don't know if it would ultimately be worth it. The sort of format that I have, these TV things, sit somewhere between documentaries and reality shows and entertainment shows and dramas.
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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.
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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.
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A bedrock of insecurity made me want to impress and want to be the center of attention.
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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.
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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.
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People are just passively accepting what you tell them, so if you are on TV there is that greater responsibility to be true.
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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.
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If you do magic, it's the quickest most fraudulent route to impressing people.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If people have very big personalities, I find myself feeling I have nothing to offer.
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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.
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Magic's quite a solitary pursuit - a thing you can do for hours and hours, getting better and better.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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So I don't really suffer too badly from fears - I'm quite happy to engender them in other people though!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Magic has both feet planted in cheap vaudeville and childish posturing; in dishonesty and therefore not in art.
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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.
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I had a natural aptitude for wanting to be the centre of attention and a definite skill for annoying people.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm finally having my TV removed and replaced by a tropical fish tank, which I hope will provide more interesting viewing.
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Kindness and compassion aren't political qualities even though they get politicized.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sexuality is often tied in with something you feel you lack in yourself and look for in others.
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The big, fun, ambitious ideas tend to come out of the frustration of talking for too long about the smaller, weaselly ones.
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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.
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I've got a house full of taxidermy. It's like a museum. I have about 200 pieces in total, all ethically sourced.
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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.
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