Quotes from Derren Brown

I like to eat other people's food in restaurants.

When you're with your partner, I think, does everyone else sing and do the stupid voices and all that stuff that I do and always have done?

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

So I don't really suffer too badly from fears - I'm quite happy to engender them in other people though!

If people have very big personalities, I find myself feeling I have nothing to offer.

I'm probably more persuasive than the next person if I want to be, but do I want to be? In my head, I just don't go there.

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

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

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.

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.

In my 20s, I just had to be the centre of attention all the time. I was quite eccentric.

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

I was a Christian when I was young and didn't know any better.

We forget our health and comfort and notice a pinching shoe. Much of living well is detaching from our boring stories of pain and shifting focus

Magic is a performance, and a performance should have an honesty, a relevance and a resonance if it is to be offered to spectators without insulting them.

I am often dishonest in my techniques ... I happily admit to cheating, it's all part of the game. I hope some of the fun for the viewer comes from not knowing what's real and what isn't

Suggestibility is a very loose term. You may not be the sort of person who responds well to a hypnotist on stage, but you might find, for example, that a doctor administering a placebo to you is something you respond well to.

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

I wore a cloak for many years, I had long hair, I may have had a drop earring for a week and I fancied myself as a philosopher poet but was somewhere more in the gay female leisure pirate.

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.

I really liked 'Heist,' and that seems to be a popular favourite, but I think my personal favourite was 'Hero at 30,000 ft,' about the guy who ended up landing the aeroplane.

Not everything is about causing controversy. That would be a very boring way to go.

Taking up magic was a distraction from my sexuality. There is that 1970s cliche of the gay man as hairdresser, interior decorator, fashionista... and all of those things are about arranging surfaces in a very dazzling way - and magic is all about how you arrange surfaces. I got very good at deflecting people from things I didn't want them to see.

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.