139 Quotes by Derren Brown

When I started doing magic I was quite obsessive about it. I didn't feel impressive and I had a strong desire to impress people. I was putting all my creative energy into learning and performing tricks, and it helps if you're not in relationships or doing the stuff other people are doing. But it's not necessarily a healthy way of living.

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.

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.

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.

As a performer you often feel that you're the child and everyone else is a grown-up.

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.

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

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