Derren Brown

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

“I went to a party when I was a student and they had a mynah bird up in the bedroom where people put their coats. I was completely captivated - I just sat there all night talking to it. The next day I passed a pet shop and they had a conure - it's a little parakeet - in the window. I bought it, not knowing what it was or how to look after it.”

“There was something about me even at an early age that enjoyed charming and manipulating.”

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

“Since turning 40 I happily moisturise - I have what's called a regime - but I'm always in two minds because I have no idea if I'm completely wasting my money. They feel nice when they are on but I can't stop wondering, 'Am I succumbing to the same nonsense I try to fight against in other areas?'”

“I was allowed to do whatever made me happy. I can't think of a better or more worthwhile approach to parenting.”

“When you're made to be frightened within a safe context, like watching a horror film, you have that tension/release which triggers all those happy chemicals that feel good.”

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

“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 had no sense of 'Gotta work hard to be famous.' Never have done, and still don't.”

“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.”

“The process of coming out is normally very disappointing. It's not that people react badly to it - they really don't care.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Hypnosis is just suggestibility; you see it in certain people.”

“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.”

“The abnegation of empathy in the case of something as complex and variable as sexual taste is a dangerous thing. The particular misfortune of the paedophile is not that he is a walking manifestation of evil but that his or her sexual development (as much subject to nature, nurture and questions of identity as any of ours) has resulted in a potentially very harmful and unacceptable attraction. We rightly call it a disorder because of these damaging effects, but merely reacting with horror will do little towards solving a complex and difficult issue stemming from a sexual drive as real and compulsive as any of us are used to.”