“Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.”

“There is that in the Notre Dame fan which makes him intolerable to others, namely, his unassailable confidence that in a well-ordered universe Notre Dame is meant to win all of its games.”

“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not. A sense of humour was provided to console him for what he is.”

“He could not play the game without hope; could not play the game without a dream. They had taken it all away from him now, they had turned away from him and there was nothing for him now...He was alone and there was nothing for him.”

“My friend Simon managed only sixteen of the seventeen League games - he smashed his head on a bookshelf in London a few hours before the Grimsby game on the 28th of Decemebr; his girlfriend had to take his car keys away from him because he kept making dazed attempts to drive from Fulham up to the Abbey.”

“No Scrabble. More and more of his friends were playing it now, in a knowing ironic way, triple-word-score-craving freaks, but it seemed to him like a game designed expressly to make him feel stupid and bored.”