P.G. Wodehouse Quotes

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.

Hugo?’ ‘Millicent?’ ‘Is that you?’ ‘Yes. Is that you?’ ‘Yes.’ Anything in the nature of misunderstanding was cleared away. It was both of them.

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

Golf, like the measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious.

I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write.

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.

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.

The real objection to the great majority of cats is their insufferable air of superiority.

Sudden success in golf is like the sudden acquisition of wealth. It is apt to unsettle and deteriorate the character.

Flowers are happy things.

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.

I pity the shrimp that matches wits with you Jeeves

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

It is fatal to let any dog know that he is funny, for he immediately loses his head and starts hamming it up.

Intoxicated? The word did not express it by a mile. He was oiled, boiled, fried, plastered, whiffled, sozzled, and blotto.

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

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.

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.

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

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

When you're alone you don't do much laughing.

He groaned slightly and winced like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch.

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

Judges, as a class, display, in the matter of arranging alimony, that reckless generosity which is found only in men who are giving away someone else's cash.

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.

I turned on the pillow with a little moan, and at this juncture Jeeves entered with the vital oolong. I clutched at it like a drowning man at a straw hat.

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.

She had more curves than a scenic railway

[I'm] as broke as the ten commandments.

Always 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.

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

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.

It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.

Chumps always make the best husbands. All the unhappy marriages come from the husbands having brains.

She looked like something that might have occured to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.

Another of these strong silent men. The world is full of us.

A golfer needs a loving wife to whom he can describe the day's play through the long evening.

It is the glorious uncertainty of golf that makes it the game it is.

A lesser moustache, under the impact of that quick, agonised expulsion of breath, would have worked loose at the roots.

She gave me another of those long keen looks, and I could see that she was again asking herself if her favourite nephew wasn't steeped to the tonsils in the juice of the grape.

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

Routine is the death to heroism.

The trouble with cats is that they've got no tact.

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

I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.

He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner-gong due any moment.

I love writing. I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing.

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

I shuddered from stem to stern, as stout barks do when buffeted by the waves.