“Are you serious? Are you serious?”

"Forward to an Exhibit: II" (1945)
Context: Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy.
Easy?
Of course—you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands.
I never met him.
Who?
Everybody.
Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting?
I am.
Pardon me?
I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational.
Not all painting.
No: housepainting is representational.
And what does a housepainter represent?
Ten dollars an hour.
In other words, you don’t want to be serious—
It takes two to be serious.

The Abolition of Work (1985)
Context: These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game — but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

“I’m always serious, never more so than when I’m being flippant.”
Source: Culture series, Look to Windward (2000), Chapter 11 “Absence of Gravitas” (p. 231)

And I said "Right."
Spoken on the Track "The Story of Reuben Clamzo" on the album One Night.

Source: City of Bones

Book of Humorous Quotations, ed. Connie Robertson (1998), page 83

Button-Moulder, Act V, Scene VII
Peer Gynt (1867)

Source: Shadowfever

The Osbournes