P.G. Wodehouse Quotes: 31

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

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

  Very Good, Jeeves!

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

• 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.

  The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

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

  Very Good, Jeeves!

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

  The Code of the Woosters

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

• 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.

  Carry on, Jeeves

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

  The Code of the Woosters

• 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.

  The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology

• 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.

  My Man Jeeves

• 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.

  The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

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

  Love Among the Chickens

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

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

  Very Good, Jeeves!

• 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?

  Mike and Psmith

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

  Love Among the Chickens

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

  The Adventures of Sally

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

  The Small Bachelor

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

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

  Carry on, Jeeves

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

• I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.

• 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.

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

• 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.

  The Girl in Blue

• 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.

  Jeeves in the Morning

• [A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start."(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)

• 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.

  Wodehouse On Wodehouse

• 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.

  Cocktail Time

• One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.