P. G. Wodehouse Quotes

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

I suppose even Dictators have their chummy moments, when they put their feet up and relax with the boys, but it was plain from the outset that if Roderick Spode had a sunnier side, he had not come with any idea of exhibiting it now. His manner was curt. One sensed the absence of the bonhomous note. ... Here he laid a hand on my shoulder, and I can't remember when I have experienced anything more unpleasant. Apart from what Jeeves would have called the symbolism of the action, he had a grip like the bite of a horse. "Did you say 'Oh yes?'" he asked. "Oh no," I assured him.

There was the man who seemed to be attempting to decieve his ball and lull it into a false sense of security by looking away from it and then making a lightning slash in the apparent hope of catching it off its guard.

It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

Birds, except when broiled and in the society of a cold bottle, bored him stiff.

[He] saw that a peculiar expression had come into his nephew's face; an expression a little like that of a young hindu fakir who having settled himself on his first bed of spikes is beginning to wish that he had chosen one of the easier religions.

What is Love compared with holing out before your opponent?

It isn't often that Aunt Dahlia lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.

The test of a great golfer is his ability to recover from a bad start.

Golf is the Great Mystery. Like some capricous goddess, it bestows its favours with what would appear an almost fat-headed lack of method and discrimination. On every side we see big two-fisted he-men floundering round in three figures, stopping every few minutes to let through little shrimps with knock-knees and hollow cheeks, who are tearing up snappy seventy-fours.

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

Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.

Well, you know what the Fulham Road's like. If your top-hat blows off into it, it has about as much chance as a rabbit at a dogshow.

I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.

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.

I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well." ~ Bertram "Bertie" Wooster

Luck is a goddess not to be coerced and forcibly wooed by those who seek her favours. From such masterful spirits she turns away. But it happens sometimes that, if we put our hand in hers with the humble trust of a little child, she will have pity on us, and not fail us in our hour of need.

I pity the shrimp that matches wits with you Jeeves

You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower.

You are falling into your old error, Jeeves, of thinking that Gussie is a parrot. Fight against this. I shall add the oz.

Some time ago," he said, "--how long it seems! -- I remember saying to a young friend of mine of the name of Spiller, 'Comrade Spiller, never confuse the unusual with the impossible.' It is my guiding rule in life.

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.

The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.

I started violently, as if some unseen hand had goosed me.

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

Do men who have got all their marbles go swimming in lakes with their clothes on?

It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.

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.

This Vladimir Brusiloff to whom I have referred was the famous Russian novelist. . . . Vladimir specialized in gray studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide. . . . Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually give out.

Well, there it is. That's Jeeves. Where others merely smite the brow and clutch the hair, he acts. Napoleon was the same.

You probably think that being a guest in your aunt's house I would hesitate to butter you all over the front lawn and dance on the fragments in hobnailed boots, but you are mistaken. It would be a genuine pleasure. By an odd coincidence I brought a pair of hobnailed boots with me!' So saying, and recognising a good exit line when he saw one, he strode out, and after an interval of tense meditation I followed him. (Spode to Wooster)

The brains of members of the Press departments of motion-picture studios resemble soup at a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them.

No one so dislikes being punished unjustly as the person who might have been punished justly on scores of previous occasions, if he had only been found out.

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.

She's one of those soppy girls, riddled from head to foot with whimsy. She holds the view that the stars are God's daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case. She's a drooper.

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

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.

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.

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.

She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.

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.

Woman is the unfathomable, incalculable mystery, the problem we men can never hope to solve.

When Cynthia smiles, said young Bingo, the skies are blue; the world takes on a roseate hue; birds in the garden trill and sing, and Joy is king of everything, when Cynthia smiles. He coughed, changing gears. When Cynthia frowns - What the devil are you talking about?I'm reading you my poem. The one I wrote to Cynthia last night. I'll go on, shall I?No!No?No. I haven't had my tea.

I clutched at the brow. The mice in my interior had now got up an informal dance and were buck-and-winging all over the place like a bunch of Nijinskys.

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

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.

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.

She's a sort of human vampire-bat