“A true Englishman doesn't joke when he is talking about so serious a thing as a wager.”

“There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.”

“We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp.”

“A joke is a very serious thing.”

“There's so few things men can talk about. If a man doesn't like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn't like either of them, well, I'm in trouble anyway: he don't like girls.”

“Sometimes When You Are Serious, People Thought You Were Joking, But Sometimes When You Are Joking, People Thought You Were Serious”