P. G. Wodehouse Quotes
-
I don’t say I’ve got much of a soul, but, such as it is, I’m perfectly satisfied with the little chap. I don’t want people fooling about with it. ‘Leave it alone,’ I say. ‘Don’t touch it. I like it the way it is.’
-
'There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?''‘The mood will pass, sir.’
-
...his head emerged cautiously, like that of a snail taking a look around after a thunderstorm.
-
He enjoys that perfect peace, that peace beyond all understanding, which comes to its maximum only to the man who has given up golf.
-
I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.
-
You are falling into your old error, Jeeves, of thinking that Gussie is a parrot. Fight against this. I shall add the oz.
-
...what I feel we ought to do at this juncture is to dash off somewhere where it's quiet and there aren't so many housesdancing the 'Blue Danube' and shove some tea into ourselves. And over the pot and muffins I shall have something veryimportant to say to you.
-
A man who has spent most of his adult life trying out a series of patent medicines is always an optimist.
-
My Aunt Agatha, the curse of the Home Counties and a menace to one and all.
-
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.
-
She could not have gazed at him with a more rapturous intensity if she had been a small child and he a saucer of ice cream.
-
...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.
-
As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.
-
Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove.
-
Mr Howard Saxby, literary agent, was knitting a sock. He knitted a good deal, he would tell you if you asked him, to keep himself from smoking, adding that he also smoked a good deal to keep himself from knitting.
-
There is about him something that seems to soothe and hypnotize. To the best of my knowledge, he has never encountered a charging rhinoceros, but should this contingency occur, I have no doubt that the animal, meeting his eye, would check itself in mid-stride, roll over and lie purring with its legs in the air.
-
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.
-
...smoking is just a habit. 'Tolstoy', she said, mentioning someone I hadn't met, 'says that just as much pleasure can be got from twirling the fingers'. My impulse was to tell her Tolstoy was off his onion, but I choked down the heated words. For all I know, the man might be a bosom pal of hers and she might resent criticism of him, however justified.
-
Henry glanced hastily at the mirror. Yes, he did look rather old. He must have overdone some of the lines on his forehead. He looked something between a youngish centenarian and a nonagenarian who had seen a good deal of trouble.
-
I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow named Pig-something-a sculptor he would have been, no doubt-who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life. A pretty nasty shock for the chap, of course.
-
One prefers, of course, on all occasions to be stainless and above reproach, but, failing that, the next best thing is unquestionably to have got rid of the body.
-
Scarcely had I entered the sitting-room when I found ... what appeared at first sight to be the Devil, A closer scrutiny informed me that it was Gussie Fink-Nottle, dressed as Mephistopheles.
-
There are three things in the world that he held in the smallest esteem - slugs, poets and caddies with hiccups.
-
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.