Skeptics

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

"The desire to impress is an efficient means of bringing out one’s least impressive qualities."

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

"Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the extraordinary father of modern conjuring, made the salient point that ‘a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician’. This is a very good description. However, an actor takes for granted how to create drama in every word, movement and look. The average magician is barely aware of its existence."

"In magic, anyone with a shop-bought trick deck is a magician, and if people aren’t 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."

"A diner having a row with a waiter in a swanky restaurant chills the blood in a way that a quarrel over a pizza order elsewhere would never do. Compassion is rarely the custom of the privileged."

"I have had no formal training in painting: I gave up Art A level because I was sick of drawing peppers."

"Language is a gift that puts lyrics to the music of our lives. Without spoken language we wouldn’t be able to say, ‘I love you’. We’d have to say ‘uuurrrgghh’ or hold up a sign. And whether it’s one person’s gentle English or another’s muddy, arrogant French, it’s our language that makes us unapproachable and difficult to understand."

"The potential for self-loathing comes from the unavoidable problem that one is engaging in a childish, fraudulent activity: although it has the capacity to delight and amaze, the performer is also a hair’s breadth from being justifiably treated like a silly child. It is, after all, just tricks."

"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."

"There will always be liars, swindlers and charlatans. Hopefully there will also always be the modern Houdinis and the seekers of the truth, snapping at their heels and holding them to account."

"Since the 1920s, grand illusion on stage has been synonymous with the restraint and mutilation of female assistants, as if the first act a lucky mortal, newly endowed with the ability to overturn the laws of the universe, would wish to carry out would be the casual torture of the fairer sex for our entertainment."

"One of the reasons I enjoy going to the Opera is the spectacle of an audience enraptured. Their emotions are engaged, their passions brought to the fore, they become highly sensitive."

"All told, kindness is not fashionable"

"Most people think themselves kind enough, but rather like a magician thinking he is fooling an audience who can see through his trick, we are the worst judges of the effect we have on others. True, we can mentally point out various kindnesses we have committed and those pleasant aspects of ourselves. Yet by doing so, we ignore the real test cases: how we behave under pressure, how nice we are to people we don’t like, how we deal with other people who seem determined to not live up to our unrealistic expectations."

"To forgive purely because it is nicer to forgive, and to do so when it’s a tough call; to try to speak only kindly of those we know because it is preferable to do so; to enjoy the successes of others because living thus is more enjoyable than the stress of living resentfully: such kind things make us better, lovlier people. And to try to live this way for its own merits, without invoking a supernatural reason for doing so, is to celebrate our humanity and to give kindness back its teeth."

"In the same breath, one might add that the atheist is surely as religious as the Christian, in that he has adopted a set of beliefs to which he chooses to rigorously adhere. While it’s temptingly clever to make that claim, it is a nonsensical statement; no more logical than to say that a Christian is a type of atheist. Having a set of beliefs about religion is not the same as being a religious True Believer."

"If you concern yourself with telling or showing people how interesting you are, you will at best provoke a temporary response of polite interest until even that gives way to annoyance. If you let people find it out for themselves, you become a real source of fascination."

"There is a real irony to the NLPers I knew who prided themselves on their communication skills yet because of their need to let everyone know how engaging they were, they were among the least engaging"

"Dull magic is a collection of tricks: great magic should sting."

"The sort of ill-informed armchair moralizing that pours from the permanently outraged, Daily Mail-reading mentality is one of the more revolting and frightening aspects of our society."

"The capacity for self-deception, rarely acknowledged or understood by those who offer us supernatural answers to our problems, is huge: as easy as it is to make a medium’s cold-reading statements ‘fit’ our own situation and come to believe that he must have some paranormal insight, it is hardly any more difficult for a would-be psychic with an average ego, upon hearing frequently positive feedback, to believe over time that he must be blessed with a special gift. It’s harder to think you’re doing it for real when you’re tossing tambourines in the dark or have ready-made ectoplasm stuffed into your mouth or bottom."

"The appreciation of a painting or a piece of music, for example, or even falling in love, is all about our subjectivity. But to decide that the entire universe operates in such a way, let alone to go to war because we are so convinced we are right that others must agree with us or die, that surely should demand a higher level of argument than 'It's true because I really, really feel it is."

"We are allowed to question people about their politics or ethics and expect them to defend their beliefs, or at least hold their own in any other important matter by recourse to evidence, yet somehow on the massive subject of God and how he might have us behave, all rational discussion must stop the moment we hear 'I believe'."

"Moderate religious people may of course express distaste for such violence, pretending that the clear calls for grotesque and violent behaviour in their sacred book aren't there and cherry-picking the 'nice bits', but they are still guilty of not opening up the subject of belief to rational discourse, and in doing so are part of the machinery that leads to all the ugliness caused by fundamentalism."

"One can be a true believer in anything: psychic ability, Christianity or, as Bertrand Russell classically suggested (with irony), in the fact there is a teapot orbiting the earth. I could believe any of those things with total conviction. But my conviction doesn't make them true. Indeed, it is something of an insult to the very truth I might hold dear to say that something is true just because I believe it is."

"If a piece of 'alternative medicine' can be shown to work reliably, it ceases to become alternative. It just becomes medicine."

"Science is unusual in that it is cumulative. It is a system built over time, wherein useful information is retained and ideas that simply don't stand up are discarded, based on the confirmation of knowledge through testing."

"Magicians do not, as a rule, presume that their audiences are intelligent and sensitive enough to want the magic to be challenging and cathartic. This is not a healthy starting point, for it stultifies magic and leaves it too close to children’s entertainment."

"Few things make me more livid than insulting bad theatre of any sort. Conversely, perfectly realised and exquisitely elegant performance can move me deeply and reduce me to sobbing like a big girl."

"One minute she is a sweet old silly, knitting herself a set of syringe covers and talking about her favourite flowers, and the very next moment she has told you and your friends she has a ring supporting the back of her vagina."

"I decided that my magic had to change. That I had to give serious thought to presentation. That, in fact, my presentation of the effects is where my impact as a magician lies – I realised that it can turn a good effect into something artistic and stunning."

"I deeply, and widely, believe that performance is a very personal affair, and that one must pursue one’s own sense of integrity and remain a little detached from advice and precedent offered by tradition."

"Not believing in something is not in itself a belief or a philosophy: it is the 'ism' at the end that tends to cause the trouble. Both atheists and believers can be as arrogant and witless as each other in frustrated debate, and people may choose strong and unapologetic words to raise awareness of the agenda. But despite the name-calling, it is still a fair point that to not believe in God is no more a 'belief in itself' than to not believe in the Loch Ness Monster, Poseidon or anything else one might personally consider far-fetched. Beyond that, there is only how you choose to express yourself."

"For a while now I have concerned myself with engaging people’s beliefs. A large part of me wishes to have people retain a scepticism about what I do and apply that to other areas in life where our beliefs are manipulated in ugly ways."

"Uninformed strong opinions - and I particularly include religious ones, which for some reason get special treatment - are of course mere clusters of prejudices and no more appropriate than mine, yours or anyone else's are on topics we don't understand - as worthless as my opinions on hockey, Noel Edmonds or rimming."

"The balls, the chutzpah, the gall, nerve and impudence of the successful lie that is huge enough never to be questioned is always a source of immense professional pleasure amongst magicians with any sense of the theatrical."

"Some people like to talk of intuition as a way of knowing truth; that gut reactions are as good as evidence based facts. It’s a really silly way of thinking..."

"Derren Brown has taken the cheese out of showbiz magic and restored the sense of wonder - Time Out"

"He’s Derren, a charming, bearded buffoon. He’ll read your brain, and make it slushy. – Sung by Andy Nyman, Trick of the Mind, Series 1, DVD extras"

"Essential viewing... difficult not to be dazzled... boggles the mind - The Times"

"Part James Bond, part Yoda - Guardian Guide"

"Brown is jaw-droppingly good - Radio Times"

"Mind-blowing. His tricks are amazing - The Guardian"

"Clearly the greatest dinner party guest in history – he’s either a balls-out con artist or the scariest man in Britain -The Guardian"

"How wonderful that there are still people around who’ll put in the hours of thought and hard slog so that people like me can simply sit back and lap it all up without being blinded by fire and brimstone and a vast array of visible trickery. How wonderful that there are still those who rely on performance rather than props, on delivery rather than pure end-result. How marvellous to enjoy a mere handful of props and, to be crude, a truckload of talent. – MagicWeek"

"Yet what makes the show what it is - a truly mesmerising theatrical event that should live forever in the memory - is the magic and the variety, speed and dexterity with which Brown performs it. Looking around the auditorium of this sold-out theatre, with everyone on their feet at the show’s climax, it’s probably the most fun they’re likely to have this year. Derren Brown is simply astonishing to witness on stage. – The Stage"

"While on TV Brown downplays his role in proceedings – which may be a sleight of hand in itself – here his personality is to the fore, helped by a witty script and some unobtrusive direction. And what comes across strongest, aside from the unfailingly impressive feats of memory and suggestion, is a wryly self-aware sense of humour. Here he knocks the ponderous, self-aggrandising stunts of closest peer David Blaine’s into a cocked hat. – The Stage"

"His greatest achievement is in taking the fusty world of magic and dragging it by its faded velvet lapels into the 21st century. For in many ways Brown is an old-fashioned illusionist, something to which both his set – with its vaudeville atmosphere – and his patter attests, but, by giving his tricks the veneer of science and psychology, he makes them appeal to a modern, and supposedly more savvy, audience. – The Stage"

"From the moment Brown strode energetically on to the stage, all thoughts of what he is – mystic or magician – or how he accomplishes such mind-bending feats are forgotten. Everybody is transported into a weird world of wonder. It’s spooky, but it’s also a whole heap of fun. The first half of the show is everything that Brown has become renowed for. His unfailing ability to work out in advance what people are going to think or how they are going to act is uncanny, drawing gasps from the crowd at every turn. It’s theatre and entertainment at its best. – Edinburgh Evening News"