Quotes from Derren Victor Brown

Shopping Malls: Modern cathedrals to spending money. Theyre designed to disorientate us and make us stay longer than we need to. Every brick is there to manipulate us to buy.

A good communicator affects our physiology. The power of voice can entrance us even induce or remove pain.

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

For me, the most enjoyable aspect of going out and performing is that I never know how susceptible people will be to my methods.

One of the techniques that I use to imitate psychic phenomena is photographic memory.

All of us can be influenced through psychological techniques. For example, if I say dont 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 peoples thoughts, behaviour, even their memory.

People are always saying, Can you use your skills to get extraordinarily beautiful women into bed? Well... yes, yes I can.

Magic means nothing. It has the potential to connect us to something wonderful, as does any performance, but it is not wonderful in itself, for it is inseparable from the particular performance in which it is experienced. A magician who is too fast, too slow, mumbles, shouts, smells, is unlikeable or incomprehensible will unavoidably taint his magic with his personal failings.

Participant. A participant is active, a part of the process, and a necessary component of the magical experience. This is how it should be. No magic happens unless the participant perceives it as magical, so she can never be a mere spectator.

I cannot see the word troubled prefixing the name of some poor starlet who has been dragged through the mire of tabloid spite without vomiting directly onto the newspaper. Troubled by whom? Troubled by you, you fuckwits.

When we are customarily annoyed by what we see as the failings of others, we are judging them by a ludicrous standard: we are assuming that they fully understand our desires, quite possibly better than we do, and that they have nothing to do but arrange things to fall seamlessly into place around our probably ill-communicated wishes.

The single most valuable human trait, the one quality every schoolchild and adult should be taught to nurture, is, quite simply, kindness.

The desire to impress is an efficient means of bringing out ones least impressive qualities.

In magic, anyone with a shop-bought trick deck is a magician, and if people arent fooled they usually pretend to be, and they are understandably likely to mistake being fooled as a sign of being in the presence of an excellent magician.