Derren Brown Quotes

Many things we misread as meaningful are quite ordinary coincidences. For example, it’s not unlikely that occasionally someone will phone you after you’ve been thinking about them. But we give these things value to make sense of our lives.

Since the 1920s, grand illusion on stage has been synonymous with the restraint and mutilation of female assistants, as if the first act a lucky mortal, newly endowed with the ability to overturn the laws of the universe, would wish to carry out would be the casual torture of the fairer sex for our entertainment.

Paul [McKenna] and I have been working on making each other’s hair fall out for years now, with some success.

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

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.

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.

The desire to impress is an efficient means of bringing out one’s least impressive qualities.

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.

The sort of ill-informed armchair moralizing that pours from the permanently outraged, Daily Mail-reading mentality is one of the more revolting and frightening aspects of our society.

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?

A lot is said about children having stronger psychic ability because they’re so unjaded and innocent. This excruciating view of children is generally expounded by people who think like children and perhaps can be forgiven.

All of us can be influenced through psychological techniques. For example, if I say “don’t think of a black cat” what do you do? You think of a black cat because the command ‘think of a black cat’ was there in the sentence. Techniques like this can be used to influence people’s thoughts, behaviour, even their memory.

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

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.

(speaking of Blackpool) Ah, I remember I used to come here as a child and it’s still really... shit, isn’t it, let’s be honest.