A biography for Derren Brownhasn’t been written yet.
“Psychic, illusionist... I'm just doing the things that I find interesting and worthwhile.”
“When touring I get to travel around with my best friends, do a show I love and I'm confident people will enjoy, and have all the adrenalin that comes with performing.”
“Many atheists might proudly proclaim that our lives have no ultimate meaning, yet the business of finding significance in one's life is perhaps the most important part of being human. When we drift into a life without meaning, we soon become a pack of symptoms and pathologies; and without any feeling of significance, many choose to end their lives altogether.”
“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.”
“Clearly if a hypnotist could make someone to steal £100k just by telling them to, the world would be a different place, and I suspect that hypnotists wouldn't bother doing shows in pubs or dodgy Spanish holiday resorts.”
“I think it's important to be sort of nice.”
“I love touring, more than anything. Doing the stage show is a more enjoyable process than TV. There are no safeguards but the payoff is the wow factor.”
“I'll sometimes go a week or two without tweeting, and then when I'm in the mood, tweet loads, and clog up people's in-boxes. It's a moment when you feel like sharing something.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Glenn Close is my favourite actress and she came to see the show in London once which was giddying.”
“It used to frustrate me when I'd get celebrities on my shows and I had to meet them as this ludicrous magician character rather than as myself.”
“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?”
“I'm probably a little shyer than people imagine.”
“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.”
“If something's stressful I've always tended to just find ways of avoiding it rather than rising to meet it or try to change it.”
“Everything you do is about creating an experience in the viewer's head. If you're rude or irritating as a performer, then your magic is irritating.”
“When I was at University I had a sort of fear about going to the gym and that kind of blokeish environment, which was rooted in a feeling of total inadequacy, which is what fear is.”
“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.”
“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.”