P.G. Wodehouse Quotes

I like B. Wooster the way he is. Lay off him, I say. Don't try to change him, or you may lose the flavour. Even when we were merely affianced, I recalled, this woman had dashed the mystery thriller from my hand, instructing me to read instead a perfectly frightful thing by a bird called Tolstoy. At the thought of what horrors might ensue after the clergyman had done his stuff and she had a legal right to bring my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave, the imagination boggled. It was a subdued and apprehensive Bertram Wooster who some moments later reached for the hat and light overcoat and went off to the Savoy to shove food into the Trotters. The

I'm much too much the popular pet ever since I sang 'Every Nice Girl Loves A Sailor' at the village concert last year. I had them rolling in the aisles. Three encores, and so many bows that I got a crick in the back."
"Spare me the tale of your excesses," I said distantly.
"I wore a sailor suit."
"Please," I said, revolted.

In love with me. Don't be absurd."
"My dear old thing, you don't know young Bingo. He can fall in love with anybody."
"Thank you!"
"Oh, I didn't mean it that way, you know. I don't wonder at his taking to you. Why, I was in love with you myself once."
"Once? Ah! And all that remains now are the cold ashes? This isn't once of your tactful evenings, Bertie."
"Well, my dear sweet thing, dash it all, considering that you gave me the bird and nearly laughed yourself into a permanent state of hiccoughs when I asked you - "
"Oh, I'm not reproaching you. No doubt there were faults on both sides. He's very good-looking, isn't he?"
"Good-looking? Bingo? Bingo good-looking? No, I say, come now, really!"
"I mean, compared with some people," said Cynthia.

I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

I go in for what is known in the trade as 'light writing' and those who do that - humorists they are sometimes called - are looked down upon by the intelligentsia and sneered at.

Say what you will, there is something fine about our old aristocracy. I'll bet Trotsky couldn't hit a moving secretary with an egg on a dark night.

Much has been written on the subject of bed-books. The general consensus of opinion is that a gentle, slow-moving story makes the best opiate

You would be miserable if you had to go through life with a human doormat with 'Welcome' written on him. You want some one made of sterner stuff. You want, as it were, a sparring-partner, some one with whom you can quarrel happily with the certain knowledge that he will not curl up in a ball for you to kick, but will be there with the return wallop.

It was a morning when all nature shouted Fore! The breeze, as it blew gently up from the valley, seemed to bring a message of hope and cheer, whispering of chip shots holed and brassies landing squarely on the meat. The fairway, as yet unscarred by the irons of a hundred dubs, smiled greenly up at the azure sky.

I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast.

Providence looks after all the chumps of this world, and personally, I'm all for it.

When you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.

There, my boy," he said. "It's awfully kind of you, Mr. Windlebird." "My dear boy, don't mention it. If you're satisfied, I'm sure I am." Mr. Windlebird always spoke the truth when he could. He spoke it now.

I found myself wishing that Jeeves wasn't always so dashed tactful. I mean, it's all very well to remove yourself like an eel sliding into mud when the employer has a visitor, but there are moments - and it looked to me as if this was going to be one of them -
when the truer tact is to stick round and stand ready to lend a hand in the free-for-all.

He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.

I say, you don't know how I could raise fifty quite somehow, do you?"
"Why don't you work?"
"Work?" said young Bingo, surprised. "What, me? No, I shall have to think of some way.

All political meetings are very much alike. Somebody gets up and introduces the speaker of the evening, and then the speaker of the evening says at great length what he thinks of the scandalous manner in which the Government is behaving or the iniquitous goings-on of the Opposition. From time to time confederates in the audience rise and ask carefully rehearsed questions, and are answered fully and satisfactorily by the orator. When a genuine heckler interrupts, the orator either ignores him, or says haughtily that he can find him arguments but cannot find him brains. Or, occasionally, when the question is an easy one, he answers it. A quietly conducted political meeting is one of England's most delightful indoor games. When the meeting is rowdy, the audience has more fun, but the speaker a good deal less.

Have you ever been turned down by a girl who afterwards married and then been introduced to her husband? If so you'll understand how I felt when Clarence burst on me. You know the feeling. First of all, when you hear about the marriage, you say to yourself, "I wonder what he's like." Then you meet him, and think, "There must be some mistake. She can't have preferred this to me!

Angela nearly got inhaled by a shark while aquaplaning.

I wouldn't have a face like that,' proceeded the child, with a good deal of earnestness, 'not if you gave me a million dollars.' He thought for a moment, then corrected himself. 'Two million dollars!' he added.

Sir Roderick Glossop, Honoria's father, is always called a nerve specialist, because it sounds better, but everybody knows that he's a sort of janitor to the looney-bin. I mean to say, when your uncle the Duke begins to feel the strain a bit and you find him in the blue drawing room sticking straws in his hair, old Glossop is the first person you send for. ... Practically every posh family in the country has called him in at one time or another, and I suppose that, being in that position - I mean, constantly having to sit on people's heads while their nearest and dearest phone to the asylum to send round the waggon - does tend to make a chappie take what you call a warped view of humanity.

...though the conversation always touched an exceptionally high level of brilliance, there was apt to be a good deal of sugar thrown about.

For years Belpher oysters had been the mainstay of gay supper parties at the Savoy, the Carlton and Romano's. Dukes doted on them; chorus girls wept if they were not on the bill of fare. And then, in an evil hour, somebody discovered that what made the Belpher oyster so particularly plump and succulent was the fact that it breakfasted, launched and dined almost entirely on the local sewage. There is but a thin line ever between popular homage and execration.

The thought of being engaged to a girl who talked openly about fairies being born because stars blew their noses, or whatever it was, frankly appalled me.

Tut!' I said. 'What did you say?' 'I said "Tut!"' 'Say it once again, and I'll biff you where you stand. I've enough to endure without being tutted at.

Wait a minute while I think," said Miss Peavey.
There was a pause. Miss Peavey sat with knit brows.
"How would it be ... " ventured Mr. Cootes.
"Cheese it!" said Miss Peavey.
Mr. Cootes cheesed it.

To persons of spirit like ourselves the only happy marriage is that which is based on a firm foundation of almost incessant quarrelling.

Young Reggie Foljambe to my certain knowledge offered him double what I was giving him, and Alistair Bingham-Reeves, who's got a valet who had been known to press his trousers sideways, used to look at him, when he came to see me, with a kind of glittering, hungry eye which disturbed me deucedly. Bally pirates!

Hell, it is well known, has no fury like a woman who wants her tea and can't get it.

He seemed a little uneasy, and he welcomed me with something of the gratitude of the shipwrecked mariner who sights a sail.

I did not rush in with the vim I would have displayed a year or so earlier, before Life had made me the grim, suspicious man I am to-day:

A detective is only human. The less of a detective, the more human he is. Henry was not much of a detective, and his human

Alcohol is a misunderstood vitamin.

I believe, if you played your cards right, you could still marry her, Pongo.' 'Aren't you overlooking the trifling fact that I happen to be engaged to Hermione?' 'Slide out of it.' 'Ha!' 'It is what your best friends would advise. You are a moody, introspective young man, all too prone to look on the dark side of things. I shall never forget you that day at the dog races. Sombre is the only word to describe your attitude as the cop's fingers closed on your coat collar. You

After all, golf is only a game,' said Millicent. Women say these things without thinking. It does not mean that there is any kink in their character. They simply don't realise what they're saying.

Psmith is the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a plate with watercress round it, thus enabling me to avoid the blood, sweat and tears inseparable from an author's life.

She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say "when".

As life goes on, don't you find that all you need is about two real friends, a regular supply of books, and a Peke?

Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled!

From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.

He made a noise like a pig swallowing half a cabbage,

To find a man's true character, play golf with him.

Mathematicians among my readers do not need to be informed that " ... " is the algebraical sign representing a blend of wheeze, croak, and hiccough.

Into the emotional scene which followed I need not go in detail. You will have witnessed much the same sort of thing in the pictures, when the United States Marines arrive in the nick of time to relieve the beleaguered garrison. I may sum it up by saying that he fawned upon me.

I'm bound to say that New York's a topping place to be exiled in. Everybody was awfully good to me, and there seemed to be plenty of things going on, and I'm a wealthy bird, so everything was fine.

It go at that, I should be obtaining the reader's interest under false pretences. He was really only a sort of detective, a species of sleuth. At Stafford's International Investigation Bureau, in the Strand, where he was employed, they did not require

I have been studying the principles of socialism deeply of late, and I came to the conclusion that I must join the cause. It looked good to me. You work for the equal distribution of property and start in by swiping all you can and sitting on it. Ah, noble scheme! Me for it!

The only way of really finding out a man's true character is to play golf with him. In no other walk of life does the cloven hoof so quickly display itself.

To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying.

Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.

I always advise people never to give advice.

Love has had a lot of press-agenting from the oldest times; but there are higher, nobler things than love.

Some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant - better left unstirred.

I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest of suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

One of the Georges - I forget which - once said that a certain number of hours' sleep each night - I cannot recall at the moment how many - made a man something which for the time being has slipped my memory.

The only thing that prevented a father's love from faltering was the fact that there was in his possession a photograph of himself at the same early age, in which he, too, looked like a homicidal fried egg.

I'm not much of a ladies' man, but on this particular morning it seemed to me that what I really wanted was some charming girl to buzz up and ask me to save her from assassins or something. So that it was a bit of an anti-climax when I merely ran into young Bingo Little, looking perfectly foul in a crimson satin tie decorated with horseshoes.

They were real golfers, for real golf is a thing of the spirit, not of mere mechanical excellence of stroke.

Just another proof, of course, of what I often say - it takes all sorts to make a world.

Tell him my future is in his hands and that, if the wedding bells ring out, he can rely on me, even unto half my kingdom. Well, call it ten quid. Jeeves would exert himself with ten quid on the horizon, what?

He was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and forgotten to say 'when'!

I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover-the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all.

Humour, if one looks into it, is principally a matter of retrospect.

A man who has spent most of his adult life trying out a series of patent medicines is always an optimist.

A drawback to success in life is that failure, when it does come, acquires an exaggerated importance.

There's a sort of wooly headed duckiness about you. If I wasn't so crazy about Marmaduke, I could really marry you Bertie.

She's a sort of human vampire-bat

She has an eye like a man-eating fish

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?

No sir," said Mr Molloy. "I'm mighty sorry I can't meet you in any way, but the fact is I'm all fixed up in Oil. Oil's my dish. I began in Oil and I'll end up in Oil. I wouldn't be happy outside of Oil."
"Oh?" said Mr Carmody, regarding this Human Sardine with as little open hostility as he could manage on the spur of the moment.

Liz," said Mr. Cootes, lost in admiration, "when it comes to doping out a scheme, you're the snake's eyebrows!

I merely called for my hat and stick in a marked manner and legged it. But the memory rankled, if you know what I mean. We Woosters do not lightly forget. At least, we do - some things - appointments, and people's birthdays, and letters to post, and all that - but not an absolute bally insult like the above. I brooded like the dickens.

And then, just when I was beginning to think I might safely pop down in that direction and gather up the dropped threads, so to speak, time, instead of working the healing wheeze, went and pulled the most awful bone and put the lid on it.

What are the chances of a cobra biting Harold, Jeeves?"
"Slight, I should imagine, sir. And in such an event, knowing the boy as intimately as I do, my anxiety would be entirely for the snake.

Well, you certainly are the most wonderfully woolly baa-lamb that ever stepped.

Do you realize a fraction of the awful things you have let me in for? How on earth am I to remember whether I go in before the chef or after the footman? I shan't have a peaceful minute while I'm in this place.

She uttered a sound rather like an elephant taking its foot out of a mud hole in a Burmese teak forest.

There are moments in the life of every man when the impulse attacks him to sacrifice his future to the alluring gratification of the present.

It has been well said that it is precisely these moments when we are feeling that ours is the world and everything that's in it that Fate selects for sneaking up on us with the rock in the stocking.

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.

Mere surprise, however, was never enough to prevent Psmith talking. He

It was loud in spots and less loud in other spots, and it had that quality which I have noticed in all violin solos of seeming to last much longer than it actually did.

Jeeves, you really are a specific dream-rabbit."
"Thank you, miss. I am glad to have given satisfaction.

Well, why do you want a political career? Have you ever been in the House of Commons and taken a good square look at the inmates? As weird a gaggle of freaks and sub-humans as was ever collected in one spot.

There is her sty,' he said, pointing a reverent finger as they crossed the little meadow dappled with buttercups and daisies. 'And that is my pigman Wellbeloved standing by it.' Myra

It just shows how one half of the world doesn't know how three quarts live.

Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what d'you-call-it.

Reflect, old man! We have been pals for years. Your mother likes me."
"No, she doesn't."
"Well, anyway, we were at school together and you owe me a tenner."
"Oh, well," he said in a resigned sort of voice.

We part, then, for the nonce, do we?'
'I fear so, sir.'
'You take the high road, and self taking the low road, as it were?'
'Yes, sir.'
'I shall miss you, Jeeves.'
'Thank you, sir.'
'Who was that chap who was always beefing about gazelles?'
'The poet Moore, sir. He complained that he had never nursed a dear gazelle, to glad him with its soft black eye, but when it came to know him well, it was sure to die.'
'It's the same with me. I am a gazelle short. You don't mind me alluding to you as a gazelle, Jeeves?'
'Not at all, sir.

It is not too much to say I was piqued to the tonsils.

All I tried to do was to give the little brute a cheerful expression. But, as it worked out, he looks positively dissipated.

New York is a small place when it comes to the part of it that wakes up just as the rest is going to bed.

Fascination exists only in the imagination of the fascinated.

Suiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?'
'Oh, rather!'
'What do you do about it?'
'I generally take a couple of cocktails.

Has anybody ever seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.

How sharper than a serpent's tooth, I remember Jeeves saying once, it is to have a thankless child, and it isn't a dashed sight better having a thankless aunt.

Some slight friction threatening in the Balkans, sir.

She ignored my observation. This generally happens with me. Show me a woman, I sometimes say, and I will show you someone who is going to ignore my observations.

Gussie opened his vaudeville career

The medicine-man, having given him the once-over, had ordered him to abstain from all alcoholic liquids, and in addition to tool down the hill to the Royal Pump-Room each morning at eight-thirty and imbibe twelve ounces of warm crescent saline and magnesia. It doesn't sound much, put that way, but I gather from contemporary accounts that it's practically equivalent to getting outside a couple of little old last year's eggs beaten up in sea-water. And the thought of Uncle George, who had oppressed me sorely in my childhood, sucking down that stuff and having to hop out of bed at eight-fifteen to do so was extremely grateful and comforting of a morning.
At four in the afternoon he would toddle down the hill again and repeat the process, and at night we would dine together and I would loll back in my chair, sipping my wine, and listen to him telling me what the stuff had tasted like. In many ways the ideal existence.