Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The big, fun, ambitious ideas tend to come out of the frustration of talking for too long about the smaller, weaselly ones.
People are just passively accepting what you tell them, so if you are on TV there is that greater responsibility to be true.
If something's stressful I've always tended to just find ways of avoiding it rather than rising to meet it or try to change it.
That was how I started, as a hypnotist. But I didn't like the kind of gigs I was being offered. I didn't want to embarrass people.
Most people's fear of being in front of an audience can generally be conquered by being completely on top of what it is they've got to do.
The single most valuable human trait, the one quality every schoolchild and adult should be taught to nurture, is, quite simply, kindness.
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?
Our fascination with weather: its caprices and changes as an antidote to the eternal repetition of daily life; a helpful illusion of novelty
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.
The joy of doing the TV or something like 'Sacrifice' isn't really the process of doing it; the joy is going through this real-life experience.
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.
Things I've done in the past always make me cringe a bit. When I think back to being a Christian. Proselytising to people, that makes me cringe.
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
Everything you do is about creating an experience in the viewer's head. If you're rude or irritating as a performer, then your magic is irritating.
I love touring, more than anything. Doing the stage show is a more enjoyable process than TV. There are no safeguards but the payoff is the wow factor.
I wasn't terribly sociable. I had two or three friends at school. I drew things, played with Lego. My parents left me free to do whatever made me happy.
Yes, I've had a slight feeling of wanting to reclaim some of the lifestyle I had in my 20s, which means poncing around in what amounts to pirate clothes.
I was part of a very uncool group. It was a group that liked classical music. They were known as the Music School Gang or, less charitably, the Poof Gang.
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 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 like films that sort of play out in one confined area. Films that have a feeling that you're watching a play, a contained environment and a creeping tension.
A lot of unconfident kids do tricks because it's the quickest route to impressing people. You can stand behind something amazing and people think you're amazing.
Mentalist is the technical term for what I do and it covers everything from psychic medium through Uri Geller, through to magicians doing tricks with a mental theme.
When touring I get to travel around with my best friends, do a show I love and I'm confident people will enjoy, and have all the adrenalin that comes with performing.
When you start to build a serious wardrobe, the navy blazer is the very first piece you should choose. It can be a building block for an entire work and casual wardrobe.
I came across the idea of running towards the things that frighten you. Once you go and do it, you realise that the fear of it is far more powerful than actually doing it.
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 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.
I'm a British psychological illusionist, which is a term I made up, but I do these kind of mind-reading and psychological experiments. There's nothing magical about it at all.
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.
A lot of unconfident kids do tricks because it's the quickest route to impressing people," he explains. "You can stand behind something amazing and people think you're amazing.
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.
When I was at University I had a sort of fear about going to the gym and that kind of blokeish environment, which was rooted in a feeling of total inadequacy, which is what fear is.
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.
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
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 do always look back and feel faintly embarrassed by anything I've done in the past. I think that's not a terrible thing, because if you don't do that, how are you growing and moving forward?
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.
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.
The people who are most susceptible to hypnosis - the rugger bugger types - were also the ones who intimidated me most at school, so on an unconscious level I suppose I'm turning the tables on them.
Relationships are very good at making you more conscious of yourself. Especially as you get older, you develop a crust around your madnesses and shortcomings that take someone else to recognize them.
Feeling we have to be constantly updated about the lives of our friends and that everything we say has to be out there leads to frustration, anger and jealousy much more than it leads to anything else.
If someone does not have a specific charity they would like to donate to, that's OK. An undesignated donation would be split up evenly amongst all the charities supported by the Annapolis Area Complex.
Seems the seance has become the most complained-about show. It received 700 complaints. I might add that the prospect of me blowing my head off on live TV last year attracted only twenty. Fair enough, I suppose.
You have to realise that hypnosis doesn't exist: it just works on people's natural suggestibility, their expectations and capacity to unconsciously role play. You can't make someone do anything they don't want to do.
The Stoics appear during a huge time of constant wars and real political strife. And it became very popular, I think, because it's a way of distancing yourself from strife and keeping your centre of gravity within you.
Guilt's too strong a word, but there is this niggling worry that I'm a grown-up doing a childish job and it would be nice to do something more useful and to reach a number of people with an idea you think is important.
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.
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.
If you're a comedian, it's a bit of a choice whether or not you want to be funny when you're not performing because it might feel disingenuous. In the same way, I don't show people magic tricks in social situations any more.