John Barton Quotes

I always think about my jokes as like I'm driving down a street, trying to go into all the culs-de-sacs along the way. I'm just taking a thoughtful, weird journey.

There's a misunderstanding about what nonsensical things are - the idea that they're just funny, and that's the beginning and the end of it. Nonsense is not 'not sense' - it operates at the edge of sense. It teems with sense - at the same time, it resists any kind of universal understanding.

you can make mean anything.

A pun calls the meaning of a word into question, and it upsets us tremendously. We laugh because suddenly we find out we're not going to get killed. I think a lot of things work that way with photographs.

Let's just say my mind is different.

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.

It's fun to take two topics and mix them into one cartoon.

I have contrarian tendencies.

I never think in metaphors or fully make those kind of associations myself. I just lay down a complex situation and hope things arise from that.

I've always known that I have a different mentality. I can move in different ways and that's for people to realize.

Some of the words that pop up on the show have had terrible connotations. But that's the beauty of 'Countdown.'

My mind jumbles things, reassembles them, and plays with words without even being asked.

A great scholar, in the highest sense of the term, is not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the Angel of the Resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing life.

Symphony is the ability to see the big picture, connect the dots, combine disparate things into something new. Visual artists in particular are good at seeing how the pieces come together. I experienced this myself by trying to learn to draw.

Yea, marry, now it is somewhat, for now it is rhyme; before, it was neither rhyme nor reason.

The word devil is very beautiful, if you read it backwards it becomes lived.

The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form.

Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ' God can'.

Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?

If you're lucky, you don't think in a straight line.

If you want to unleash more creativity in your company, you need to allow for a little contamination. It is the sand in the oyster that creates the pearl.

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

Just as the witticism brings two very different real objects under one concept, the pun brings two different concepts, by the assistance of accident, under one word.

Scientists' minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.