Brendan Behan Quotes

God created whiskey to keep the Irish from taking over the world.

There were two Irishmen eating sandwiches in a pub and the landlord said: "You can't eat your own food in here." So they swapped sandwiches.

Dear optimist, pessimist, and realist--while you guys were busy arguing about the glass of wine, I drank it! Sincerely, the opportunist!

[On the Irish:] Strange race ... Don't know what they want, but want it like the devil.

Those who object to wit are envious of it.

A little wit and a great deal of ill-nature will furnish a man for satire; but the greatest instance of wit is to commend well.

I had a parakeet that used to fly around the house and crash into these huge mirrors my mother put in. Ever heard of this interior design principle, that a mirror makes it seem like you have an entire other room? What kind of jerk walks up to a mirror and goes, Hey look, there's a whole other room in there. There's a guy that looks just like me in there.

True wit never made us laugh.

A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit.

Hyacinth,” Lady Bridgerton said in a vaguely disapproving voice, “do try to speak in complete sentences.” Hyacinth looked at her mother with a surprised expression. “Biscuits. Are. Good.” She cocked her head to the side. “Noun. Verb. Adjective.” “Hyacinth.” “Noun. Verb. Adjective.” Colin said, wiping a crumb from his grinning face. “Sentence. Is. Correct.

The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

My puns are not trivial. They are quadrivial

The whole power of cunning is privative; to say nothing, and to do nothing , is the utmost of its reach. Yet men, thus narrow by nature and mean by art, are sometimes able to rise by the miscarriages of bravery and the openness of integrity, and, watching failures and snatching opportunities, obtain advantages which belong to higher characters.

I'm not trying to write a bleak and blistering screed against American civilization. I'm writing something that I hope is fun and satirical and full of possibility.

Unlike my subject will I frame my song, It shall be witty and it shan't be long.

There is nothing finer in the world than the telling of tales. Split atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitive-and getting away with it-is far nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and always more fun.

A pun is the lowest form of humor—when you don't think of it first.

People who go for humor are wonderful because they do great humor. People who go for wit and end up with humor are people who have made a mistake.

Vaclav Havel had this great sense of humor. And you kind of felt that he was making a little bit fun of everything at the same time.

It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense

Humor wades across a brook, wit jumps over it.

In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while his article is still on the presses.

A man of remarkable genius may afford to pass by a piece of wit, if it happen to border on abuse. A little genius is obliged to catch at every witticism indiscriminately.