A friendly bicycle path snakes along the beach, shaded by tall, spindly, Dr.

Seussian palms; the mountain range that surrounds the city imparts a sensation that is at once comforting and bosomlike. He reminded me that he'd once written a Pot-Shot that ran, "The secret of our wonderful relationship is that much of the time it's not really so wonderful."
"And do you believe that, Ashleigh?" I asked.
"When you see our house, you'll get a better sense of what I'm talking about."

We walked about ten minutes up the gentle slope of Santa Barbara to his and his wife's house, the décor of which I would describe as Garage Sale.

When Brilliant finds someone who has "used" one of his epigrams, he contacts them demanding a payment for breach of copyright.

For instance, television journalist David Brinkley wrote a book, Everyone is Entitled to My Opinion, the title of which he attributed to a friend of his daughter. His affect is one of determination and slight petulance; he has the facial expression of one who is perpetually swatting at a fly.

Given that Brilliant and his wife, Dorothy, were about to celebrate their fortieth anniversary, I asked him what the secret of his marriage's success was.

Life and career

Brilliant was born in London, England. He disliked public smoking, littering, excessive noise and pollution. . There he was presented with a document signed by the mayor proclaiming him to be the "Wise Old Man of the Mountain".

In an essay entitled "Against intellectual property", Brian Martin cites Brilliant as a "professional epigrammatist" who has been known to threaten legal action in order to display his market precedence over legally owned fragments of human language, thus managing to reveal one of the many absurdities behind "intellectual property", namely its ability to limit the free use and dissemination of human expression.

In 1979, when Brilliant challenged a heat-transfer-decal company that had appropriated three of his gems, a federal judge ruled that Brilliant's works - including, in this instance "I have abandoned my search for truth, and am now looking for a good fantasy" - were "epigrams," not "short phrases," and thus eligible for full copyright protection.

Deep in the bowels of a Google search one day, I came across the Web site of a seventy-five-year-old named Ashleigh Brilliant. .

It’s still on the books today.

Ashleigh was a man of many paradoxes. The whole thing was going to be buried in the back of the wall. He attended Hendon County School, London, in the 1940s–50s. Brilliant started to do pen-and-ink drawings to complement his titles, and then, before he knew it, he just started writing long lists of titles.

Bedsheets are draped over mysterious bulges, suggesting baby elephants at rest. But people responded more to the far-out titles Brilliant gave his works than to the works themselves. He's turned the small clapboard house that he and his wife used to live in into his workplace; tidy and quiet, it's filled with carousels and cardboard boxes that bear epigram-laden postcards.

He passed away on the morning of September 24, 2025 at Cottage Hospital, where he had been for three days.