P.G. Wodehouse Quotes

The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its

Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.

He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.

Red hair, sir, in my opinion, is dangerous.

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.

She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.

I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.

It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.

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.

It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.

...there was practically one handwriting common to the whole school when it came to writing lines. It resembled the movements of a fly that had fallen into an ink-pot, and subsequently taken a little brisk exercise on a sheet of foolscap by way of restoring the circulation.

The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.

Stimulated by the juice, I believe, men have even been known to ride alligators.

I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.

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

What ho!" I said.
"What ho!" said Motty.
"What ho! What ho!"
"What ho! What ho! What ho!"
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.

A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.

If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.

Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.

Mike nodded. A sombre nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812 and said, "So, you're back from Moscow, eh?

I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.

Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.

There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

In a series of events, all of which had been a bit thick, this, in his opinion, achieved the maximum of thickness.

What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?

It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.

As for Gussie Finknottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight.

Whenever I get that sad, depressed feeling, I go out and kill a policeman.

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.

This was not Aunt Dahlia, my good and kindly aunt, but my Aunt Agatha, the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth.

He's such a dear, Mr. Garnet. A beautiful, pure, bred Persian. He has taken prizes."
"He's always taking something - generally food.

She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said, "Oh, woman in our hours of ease tum tumty tiddly something please, when something something something brow, a something something something thou.

When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff.

As a rule, from what I've observed, the American captain of industry doesn't do anything out of business hours. When he has put the cat out and locked up the office for the night, he just relapses into a state of coma from which he emerges only to start being a captain of industry again.

This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.

I mean, if you're asking a fellow to come out of a room so that you can dismember him with a carving knife, it's absurd to tack a 'sir' on to every sentence. The two things don't go together.

Love is a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her friends lice.

It went automatically to a heavy-weight mother with beetling eyebrows who looked as if she had just come from doing a spot of knitting at the foot of the guillotine.

Lord Emsworth belonged to the people-like-to-be-left-alone-to-amuse-themselves-when-they-come-to-a-place school of hosts

Captain Bradbury's right eyebrow had now become so closely entangled with his left that there seemed no hope of ever extricating it without the aid of powerful machinery.

The voice of a donkey braying in the neighbouring meadow seemed like the mocking laughter of demons.

She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.

His brow was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought and his air that of a man who, if he had said ''Hullo, girls'', would have said it like someone in a Russian drama announcing that Grandpapa had hanged himself in the barn.

Look in at the Drones and ask the first fellow you meet ''Can the fine spirit of the Woosters be crushed?'' and he will offer you attractive odds against such a contingency.

-'What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?'
There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter

At a time when she was engaged to Stilton Cheesewright, I remember recording in the archives that she was tall and willowy with a terrific profile and luxuriant platinum blond-hair, the sort of girl who might, as far as looks were concerned, have been the star unit of the harem of one of the better-class sultans.

There is no pathos more bitter than that of parting from someone we have never met.

And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.

Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.

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.

Didn't Frankenstein get married?"
"Did he?" said Eggy. "I don't know. I never met him. Harrow man, I expect.

You see, the catch about portrait painting -
I've looked into the thing a bit - is that you can't start
painting portraits till people come along and ask you to, and
they won't come and ask you to until you've painted a lot first.
This makes it kind of difficult for a chappie.

There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.

Well, you know, there are limits to the sacred claims of friendship.

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.

The ideas of debtor and creditor as to what constitutes a good time never coincide.

The Duke of Dunstable had one-way pockets.
He would walk ten miles in the snow to chisel an orphan out of tuppence.

That's always the way in this world. The chappies you'd like to lend money to won't let you, whereas the chappies you don't want to lend it to will do everything except actually stand you on your head and lift the specie out of your pockets.

...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.

At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.

Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.

Squiffy, 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.

There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'"
"The mood will pass, sir.

[T]he success of every novel - if it's a novel of action - depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, "What are my big scenes?" and then get every drop of juice out of them."

(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)

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