Brian Celio Quotes

Lots of English people say exactly the opposite of what they mean.

There is a single entendre, but I don't know about a triple one.

I can be a very sarcastic person, and sometimes people take every word I say literally.

Only the pun remains. The pun, beloved of Shakespeare, children and tabloid headline-writers, is normally eschewed in the modern, sophisticated circles in which I move.

Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that 'fetch' is now the word I want to use to mean 'cool.'

There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny.

The moment I accept that there's an artistic, redeeming quality in puns, I have a horrible feeling I'll get hooked.

I say 'as it were' or 'so to speak' too often because puns and double entendres keep insinuating themselves into my consciousness as I'm talking.

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

Yankees don't understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.

Gag me with a spoon!

Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.

Time flies like an arrow - but fruit flies like a banana.

I don't know if English is the only language where some expressions only and solely mean the opposite of what they say but we do have an awful lot of them.

Americans don't like puns and plays on words, which is totally opposite in the comedy world to France or even Italy and Germany.

The exact meaning of irony is so narrow that the word is hardly worth using; in its broad, current definition, it's a euphemism for sarcasm. 'I'm not being sarcastic; I'm being ironic.' No, you're not. You're evading the responsibility for being sarcastic.

I'm not sure what 'cheeky' means. I hear it used so much and in so many different ways, I can't identify the real meaning of it.

All my plays have these titles that are oddly tricky. I like that something can look like one thing but mean two different things. Language is really unstable in that way.

In German, if a situation is tense, you say 'unter strom' - under electricity.

I make up many words but we can go on for forever about slang words that E-40 created. That has always been one of my things since was youngster. I have always being creative with my words.

Do you know what they say about big hands? Big gloves!

I don't ever get too literal.

British people have a really sophisticated sense of humour, because we're exposed to much more than Europeans and Americans, not least in our literary heritage.

My songs have some street talk in them, but that's the way I talk and the way a lot of people I know talk.

In school, my favourite class was when we were given a subject for an essay on which we could freewheel. And poetry: I've always written it and loved the way words interact, in meaning and in sound.