It's a controlling thing on stage - you're directing the action, getting people to play their role. In real life, I take being kind and nice seriously, so the last thing I'd ever want to be is that weird, controlling, manipulative character.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the contrast between performance art and authentic behavior in life, valuing kindness over control.
Derren Brown emphasizes the difference between his role as a performer, where he directs actions and manipulates situations, and his genuine desire to be kind and authentic in his real life. He laments the idea of embodying a controlling and manipulative persona outside of the theatrical context, suggesting that true compassion and kindness are vital to his identity.
In practice
In a speech about leadership, one could use this quote to highlight the importance of being kind and authentic.
Each of us is leading a difficult life, and when we meet people we are seeing only a tiny part of the thinnest veneer of their complex, troubled existences. To practise anything other than kindness towards them, to treat them in any way save generously, is to quietly deny their humanity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The name of peace is sweet and the thing itself good, but between peace and slavery there is the greatest difference.
That very church which the world likes best is sure to be that which God abhors.
We assume, to begin with, that the individual is at least as complex in his internal structure as the language is which he speaks - otherwise, how could he speak a language which is complex?
I think the greatest of people in society carved niches that represented the unique expression of their combinations of talents, and if everyone had the luxury of expressing the unique combinations of talents in this world, our society would be transformed overnight.
At the end of the day, is Singapore society better or worse off? That's the test.
It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts; but until this has occurred, words do not count.
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