Derren Brown Quotes

We all have stories we're living and telling ourselves.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.

Who are we but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them?

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

Recounting their histories, people often sound like interested bystanders to their own lives.

I like facts and data because they help me think clearly, beyond the cultural messages that I ingest unwittingly, and sometimes find myself regurgitating almost unconsciously.

Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.

Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling.

If you're going to document your own journey, the jokes work better in the first person, just like the stories do.

We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desire to tell stories.

I think everyone self-mythologizes.

The thing is, with 'This Is England', you're always thinking as yourself. You're acting on an instinct. You're acting on what you've heard, what you've been told, and what's happened beforehand.

The film-school mantra is that if you don't tell your own stories, nobody will.

The reason that I like to use classical myths as models is because African American writers and African American stories are usually understood as occurring in some kind of vacuum - because of slavery.

When you grow up in something, you don't even know if it's bad or good. You just know that's how it is.

We're all the stories we tell ourselves.

My parents had become adults during the Great Depression, as had many of my aunts and uncles, so I got stories from all of them. They are fastened up inside me, and now and again, they have to come out.

The thing that I hate the most is when people have prejudice - when they see me as the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini and not as Alessandra. That, really, I don't like. I didn't know my grandfather. I am me.

We are all at the center of our own narrative, but it's a narrative that changes every time we retell it.

People are the story they tell themselves.

The stories that you tell yourself can make or break you - no matter who you are.

You cannot question an assumption you do not know you have made.

Any story that you tell about yourself causes suffering. There is no authentic story.

There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters.