Quotes from Derren Brown

As a law graduate, this allowing of intention to trump outcome rings alarm bells for me. Imagine if while driving your car, intending to bring a friend to the hospital as quickly as possible, you hit and killed a child. You would not expect to tell that story to friends and have them respond, 'Great, so good of you to get your friend some help. Well done – and no matter about the child, you didn't mean to kill it.

These realms of heated chaos and cool logic fused together in the great Greek tragedies as audiences followed a hero trying to impose order (the Apollonian urge) on whatever random fate threw his way (the Dionysian drive).

A final piece of advice: recognise and beware the toxic blend of low self-esteem and grandiose self-regard known only to the truly damned.

Going into a game of tennis: If you go in determined to win, and then your opponent is playing better than you, you're probably going to get anxious and feel that you're failing. Whereas if you go in determined to play as well as you can, then it doesn't matter if your opponent is a bit better than you or if they start to win: you're not failing.

The sign of the true expert is his modest awareness of how much more there is to know; how complex and nuanced the subject at hand insists on remaining.

It's strange to learn that in Livermore, California, one of the first light bulbs ever manufactured remains lit, over a hundred years after it was first switched on. In the earliest example of planned obsolescence, it took a group decision by light-bulb manufacturers in the 1950s to specifically limit the life of all subsequently made bulbs to a few years, in order to ensure that people would have to come back and buy more.

neuro-linguistic programming

Hamlet: 'There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Perhaps the first mark of emotional maturity is to realise that there is an enormous gulf between the events of the world and what we do with them.

It's a rule in life that the more certain we appear about something, the less we know about it. It has a name – the Dunning–Kruger effect – and it is at work every time someone tells you with absolute certainty how things are in the world. The sign of the true expert is his modest awareness of how much more there is to know; how complex and nuanced the subject at hand insists on remaining.

there is a deeper happiness to be had in knowing that your life is part of a story of flourishing than there is in merely pursuing entertainment.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.' Later, in the nineteenth century

We forget that nothing happens in life independently of other things.

As a light briefly flares between the eternities of darkness that precede and follow us, our concern is to make sure that we enjoy its fugitive consolation.

We mistake the horizon we see for the parameters of the world.

However, as we would know if failed businessmen could sell their biographies as well as the successful ones, blind faith is more commonly a recipe for disaster than for triumph.

What I do is rooted in magic - it's got a big foot planted firmly in conjuring, even if the other foot's planted in psychological techniques.

I really do like being on stage. Compared to television I have a lot more control - it's a lot more relaxed and loose.

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.

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.

Our fascination with weather: its caprices and changes as an antidote to the eternal repetition of daily life; a helpful illusion of novelty

I never really enjoy the thought of fancy dress.

Glenn Close is my favourite actress and she came to see the show in London once which was giddying.

The big, fun, ambitious ideas tend to come out of the frustration of talking for too long about the smaller, weaselly ones.