Pg Wodehouse Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Everything in life that’s any fun, as somebody wisely observed, is either immoral, illegal or fattening.

She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say "when".

I always advise people never to give advice.

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.

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.

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.

It was one of those parties where you cough twice before you speak and then decide not to say it after all.

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

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

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

If he had a mind, there was something on it.

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.

I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.

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

It is true of course, that I have a will of iron, but it can be switched off if the circumstances seem to demand it.

I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself.

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

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.

Hell, it is well known, has no fury like a woman who wants her tea and can't get it.

It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.

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

An apple a day, if well aimed, keeps the doctor away.

She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season

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.

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.

We Woosters do not lightly forget. At least, we do - some things - appointments, and people's birthdays, and letters to post, and all that - but not an absolutely bally insult like the above.

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

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.

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

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

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.

He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.

You're one of those guys who can make a party just by leaving it. It's a great gift.

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.

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.

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.

Employers are like horses — they require management.

Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his head first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.

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

A certain critic -- for such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.

I am Psmith," said the old Etonian reverently. "There is a preliminary P before the name. This, however, is silent. Like the tomb. Compare such words as ptarmigan, psalm, and phthisis.

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.

You can't be a successful Dictator and design women's underclothing.

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

Warm-hearted! I should think he has to wear asbestos vests!

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.

I expect I shall feel better after tea.

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

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

Oh, I don't know, you know, don't you know?

I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare -- or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad -- who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.

[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)

I don't know if you know it, J.B., but you're the sort of fellow who causes hundreds to fall under suspicion when he's found stabbed in his library with a paper-knife of Oriental design.

I can detach myself from the world. If there is a better world to detach oneself from than the one functioning at the moment I have yet to hear of it.

It's a funny thing about looking for things. If you hunt for a needle in a haystack you don't find it. If you don't give a darn whether you ever see the needle or not it runs into you the first time you lean against the stack.

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.

Jeeves, you really are a specific dream-rabbit." "Thank you, miss. I am glad to have given satisfaction.

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.

I marmaladed a slice of toast with something of a flourish and I don't suppose I have ever come much closer to saying 'Tra la la' as I did the lathering for I was feeling in mid season form this morning.

What a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean.

Why do dachshunds wear their ears inside out?

everything is relative. you, for instance, are my relative.

It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.

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.

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

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.

The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness.

...it has been well said that it is precisely these moments when we are feeling that ours is the world and everything that's in it that Fate selects for sneaking up on us with the rock in the stocking.

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

He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted candle.

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.

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.

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

There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action.

Providence looks after all the chumps of this world, and personally, I'm all for it.

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 remember her telling me once that rabbits were the gnomes in attendance to the Fairy Queen and that the stars were God's daisy chain. Perfect rot, of course.

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

What you want, my lad, and what you're going to get are two very different things.

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.

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.

Every day you seem to know less and less about more and more

I suppose he must have taken about a nine or something in hats. Shows what a rotten thing it is to let your brain develop too much.

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 don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest of suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

As Shakespeare says, if you're going to do a thing you might as well pop right at it and get it over.

I flung open the door. I got a momentary flash of about a hundred and fifteen cats of all sizes and colours scrapping in the middle of the room, and then they all shot past me with a rush and out of the front door; and all that was left of the mobscene was the head of a whacking big fish, lying on the carpet and staring up at me in a rather austere sort of way, as if it wanted a written explanation and apology.

Say what you will, there is something fine about our old aristocracy. I'll bet Trotsky couldn't hit a moving secretary with an egg on a dark night.

The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.

And so the merry party began. It was one of those jolly, happy, bread-crumbling parties where you cough twice before you speak, and then decide not to say it after all.

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.

A girl who bonnets a policeman with an ashcan full of bottles is obviously good wife-and-mother timber.

Golf... is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well.

She's a sort of human vampire-bat

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the paper. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time.

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

[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.

...there occurred to me the simple epitaph which, when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my tombstone. It was this: "He was a man who acted from the best motives. There is one born every minute.

One of the drawbacks to life is that it contains moments when one is compelled to tell the truth,

She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.

As a dancer, I out-Fred the nimblest Astaire.

What I'm worrying about is what Tom is going to say when he starts talking." "Uncle Tom?" "I wish there was something else you could call him except 'Uncle Tom,' " Aunt Dahlia said a little testily. "Every time you do it, I expect to see him turn black and start playing the banjo.

Sober or blotto, this is your motto: keep muddling through.

He was one of those earnest, persevering dancers--the kind that have taken twelve correspondence lessons.

Jeeves, I'm engaged." "I hope you will be very happy, sir." "Don't be an ass. I'm engaged to Miss Bassett.

It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away.

A depressing musty scent pervaded the place, as if a cheese had recently died there in painful circumstances.

Between an egg that is fried and an egg that is cremated there is a wide and substantial difference.

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.

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

the supply of the milk of human kindness was short by several gallons

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

How does he look, Jeeves?" "Sir?" "What does Mr Bassington-Bassington look like?" "It is hardly my place, sir, to criticize the facial peculiarities of your friends.

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.

The thought of being engaged to a girl who talked openly about fairies being born because stars blew their noses, or whatever it was, frankly appalled me.

I pity the shrimp that matches wits with you Jeeves

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

Good God, Clarence! You look like a bereaved tapeworm.

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

A man who has spent most of his adult life trying out a series of patent medicines is always an optimist.

I don't want to seem always to be criticizing your methods of voice production, Jeeves, I said, but I must inform you that that 'Well, sir' of yours is in many respects fully as unpleasant as your 'Indeed, sir?

You agreee with me that the situation is a lulu? Certainly, a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, Sir.

Half a league Half a league Half a league onward With a hey-nonny-nonny And a hot cha-cha.

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

We must always remember, however,' said Psmith gravely, 'that poets are also God's creatures.

Bertie, do you read Tennyson?" "Not if I can help.

In your walks about London you will sometimes see bent, haggard figures that look as if they had recently been caught in some powerful machinery. They are those fellows who got mixed up with Catsmeat when he was meaning well.

On the occasions when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps...

It has never been hard to tell the difference between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

Have you ever been turned down by a girl who afterwards married and then been introduced to her husband? If so you'll understand how I felt when Clarence burst on me. You know the feeling. First of all, when you hear about the marriage, you say to yourself, "I wonder what he's like." Then you meet him, and think, "There must be some mistake. She can't have preferred this to me!

Mr Beach was too well bred to be inquisitive, but his eyebrows here not. 'Ah!' he said. '?', cried the eyebrows. '? ? ?' Ashe ignored the eyebrows. ... Mr Beach's eyebrows were still mutely urging him to reveal all, but Ashe directed his gaze at that portion of the room which Mr Beach did not fill. He was hanged if he was going to let himself be hypnotized by a pair of eyebrows into incriminating himself.

She came leaping towards me, like Lady Macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest-room.

There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter.

What are the chances of a cobra biting Harold, Jeeves?" "Slight, I should imagine, sir. And in such an event, knowing the boy as intimately as I do, my anxiety would be entirely for the snake.

It was a silver cow. But when I say 'cow', don't go running away with the idea of some decent, self-respecting cudster such as you may observe loading grass into itself in the nearest meadow. This was a sinister, leering, Underworld sort of animal, the kind that would spit out of the side of its mouth for twopence.

She laughed - a bit louder than I could have wished in my frail state of health, but then she is always a woman who tends to bring plaster falling from the ceiling when amused.

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

We do not tell old friends beneath our roof-tree that they are an offence to the eyesight.

as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment

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'm a bit short on brain myself; the old bean would appear to have been constructed more for ornament than for use, don't you know...

I've found, as a general rule of life, that the things you think are going to be the scaliest nearly always turn out not so bad after all.

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

Joan was nothing more than a friend. He was not in love with her. One does not fall in love with a girl whom one has met only three times. One is attracted, yes; but one does not fall in love. A moment's reflection enabled him to diagnose his sensations correctly. This odd impulse to leap across the compartment and kiss Joan was not love. It was merely the natural desire of a good-hearted young man to be decently chummy with his species.

No novelists any good except me. Sovietski -- yah! Nastikoff -- bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.

These dreamer types do live, don't they?

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

I shoved on a dressing-gown, and flew downstairs like a mighty, rushing wind.

I really preferred to walk. I have only just landed in England from New York, and it's quite a treat to walk on an English country road again.

Am taking legal advice to ascertain whether strangling an idiot nephew counts as murder. If it doesn't look out for yourself.

We Woosters freeze like the dickens when we seek sympathy and meet with cold reserve. "Nothing further Jeeves", I said with quiet dignity.

The only writer who gives me unfeigned pleasure is P.G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bit heavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown over Sunset at Blandings.

The storm is over, there is sunlight in my heart. I have a glass of wine and sit thinking of what has passed.

There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

Liz," said Mr. Cootes, lost in admiration, "when it comes to doping out a scheme, you're the snake's eyebrows!

He picked up one of the dead bats and covered it with his handkerchief. ‘Somebody’s mother,’ he murmured reverently.

I don't know why it is, but women who have anything to do with Opera, even if they're only studying for it, always appear to run to surplus poundage.

Just another proof, of course, of what I often say - it takes all sorts to make a world.

the ice was not only broken; it was shivered into a million fragments

you ever have that feeling when you step down onto a footstep that isn't there?

In his normal state he would not strike a lamb. I’ve known him to do it’ ‘Do what?’ ‘Not strike lambs

Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum.

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.

The exquisite code of politeness of the Woosters prevented me clipping her one on the ear-hole, but I would have given a shilling to be able to do it. There seemed to me something deliberately fat-headed in the way she persisted in missing the gist.

The funny thing was that he wasn't altogether a fool in other ways. Deep down in him there was a kind of stratum of sense. I had known him, once or twice, show an almost human intelligence. But to reach that stratum, mind you, you needed dynamite.

As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across premieval swamps and Uncle James's letter about Cousin Mabel's peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle ('Please read this carefully and send it on Jane') the clan has a tendency to ignore me. It's one of the advantages I get from being a bachelor - and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that.

How anybody can compose a story by word of mouth face to face with a bored-looking secretary with a notebook is more than I can imagine. Yet many authors think nothing of saying, 'Ready, Miss Spelvin? Take dictation. Quote no comma Sir Jasper Murgatroyd comma close quotes comma said no better make it hissed Evangeline comma quote I would not marry you if you were the last person on earth period close quotes Quote well comma I'm not so the point does not arise comma close quotes replied Sir Jasper twirling his moustache cynically period And so the long day wore on period End of chapter.' If I had to do that sort of thing I should be feeling all the time that the girl was saying to herself as she took it down, 'Well comma this beats me period How comma with homes for the feebleminded touting for custom on every side comma has a man like this succeeded in remaining at large mark of interrogation.

No, I am quite content with you, Bertie. By the way, I do dislike that name Bertie. I think I shall call you Harold. Yes, I am perfectly satisfied with you. You have many faults, of course. I shall be pointing some of them out when I am at leisure.

...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.

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 suppose the fundamental distinction between Shakespeare and myself is one of treatment. We get our effects differently. Take the familiar farcical situation of someone who suddenly discovers that something unpleasant is standing behind them. Here is how Shakespeare handles it in "The Winter's Tale," Act 3, Scene 3: ANTIGONUS: Farewell! A lullaby too rough. I never saw the heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour! Well may I get aboard! This is the chase: I am gone for ever. And then comes literature's most famous stage direction, "Exit pursued by a bear." All well and good, but here's the way I would handle it: BERTIE: Touch of indigestion, Jeeves? JEEVES: No, Sir. BERTIE: Then why is your tummy rumbling? JEEVES: Pardon me, Sir, the noise to which you allude does not emanate from my interior but from that of that animal that has just joined us. BERTIE: Animal? What animal? JEEVES: A bear, Sir. If you will turn your head, you will observe that a bear is standing in your immediate rear inspecting you in a somewhat menacing manner. BERTIE (as narrator): I pivoted the loaf. The honest fellow was perfectly correct. It was a bear. And not a small bear, either. One of the large economy size. Its eye was bleak and it gnashed a tooth or two, and I could see at a g. that it was going to be difficult for me to find a formula. "Advise me, Jeeves," I yipped. "What do I do for the best?" JEEVES: I fancy it might be judicious if you were to make an exit, Sir. BERTIE (narrator): No sooner s. than d. I streaked for the horizon, closely followed across country by the dumb chum. And that, boys and girls, is how your grandfather clipped six seconds off Roger Bannister's mile. Who can say which method is superior?" (As reproduced in Plum, Shakespeare and the Cat Chap )

Do you ever get moods when life seems absolutely meaningless? It's like a badly-constructed story, with all sorts of characters moving in and out who have nothing to do with the plot. And when somebody comes along that you think really has something to do with the plot, he suddenly drops out. After a while you begin to wonder what the story is about, and you feel that it's about nothing—just a jumble.

Abandon the idea, Jeeves. I fear you have not studied the sex as I have. Missing her lunch means little or nothing to the female of the species. The feminine attitude toward lunch is notoriously airy and casual. Where you have made your bloomer is confusing lunch with tea. Hell, it is well known, has no fury like a woman who wants her tea and can't get it. At such times the most amiable of the sex become mere bombs which a spark may ignite." Bertie Wooster

The snag in this business of falling in love, aged relative, is that the parties of the first part so often get mixed up with the wrong parties of the second part, robbed of their cooler judgement by the party of the second part's glamour. Put it like this: the male sex is divided into rabbits and non-rabbits and the female sex into dashers and dormice, and the trouble is that the male rabbit has a way of getting attracted by the female dasher (who would be fine for the non-rabbit) and realizing too late that he ought to have been concentrating on some mild, gentle dormouse with whom he could settle down peacefully and nibble lettuce.

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.

As I stood in my lonely bedroom at the hotel, trying to tie my white tie myself, it struck me for the first time that there must be whole squads of chappies in the world who had to get along without a man to look after them. I'd always thought of Jeeves as a kind of natural phenomenon; but, by Jove! of course, when you come to think of it, there must be quite a lot of fellows who have to press their own clothes themselves and haven't got anybody to bring them tea in the morning, and so on. It was rather a solemn thought, don't you know. I mean to say, ever since then I've been able to appreciate the frightful privations the poor have to stick.

Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to have to face over the breakfast table. Brainy, moreover. The sort of girl who reduces you to pulp with sixteen sets of tennis and a few rounds of golf and then comes down to dinner as fresh as a daisy, expecting you to take an intelligent interest in Freud.

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?

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.

The literal mind is baffled by the ironic one, demanding explanations that only intensify the joke. A vintage example, and one that really did occur, is that of P.G. Wodehouse, captured by accident during the German invasion of France in 1940. Josef Goebbels’s propaganda bureaucrats asked him to broadcast on Berlin radio, which he incautiously agreed to do, and his first transmission began: Young men starting out in life often ask me—“How do you become an internee?” Well, there are various ways. My own method was to acquire a villa in northern France and wait for the German army to come along. This is probably the simplest plan. You buy the villa and the German army does the rest. Somebody—it would be nice to know who, I hope it was Goebbels—must have vetted this and decided to let it go out as a good advertisement for German broad-mindedness. The “funny” thing is that the broadcast landed Wodehouse in an infinity of trouble with the British authorities, representing a nation that prides itself above all on a sense of humor.

Don't leave me, Bertie. I'm lost." "What do you mean, lost?" "I came out for a walk and suddenly discovered after a mile or two that I didn't know where on earth I was. I've been wandering round in circles for hours." "Why didn't you ask the way?" "I can't speak a word of French." "Well, why didn't you call a taxi?" "I suddenly discovered I'd left all my money at my hotel." "You could have taken a cab and paid it when you got to the hotel." "Yes, but I suddenly discovered, dash it, that I'd forgotten its name." And there in a nutshell you have Charles Edward Biffen. As vague and woollen-headed a blighter as ever bit a sandwich.

There is, of course, this to be said for the Omnibus Book in general and this one in particular. When you buy it, you have got something. The bulk of this volume makes it almost the ideal paper-weight. The number of its pages assures its posessor of plenty of shaving paper on his vacation. Place upon the waistline and jerked up and down each morning, it will reduce embonpoint and strengthen the abdominal muscles. And those still at their public school will find that between, say, Caesar's Commentaries in limp cloth and this Jeeves book there is no comparison as a missile in an inter-study brawl.

I say, Bertie, is it really true that you were once engaged to Honoria?" "It is." Biffy coughed. "How did you get out - I mean, what was the nature of the tragedy that prevented the marriage?" "Jeeves worked it. He thought out the entire scheme." "I think, before I go," said Biffy thoughtfully, "I'll just step into the kitchen and have a word with Jeeves." I felt that the situation called for complete candour. "Biffy, old egg," I said, "as man to man, do you want to oil out of this thing?" "Bertie, old cork," said Biffy earnestly, "as one friend to another, I do.

Talking of being eaten by dogs, there’s a dachshund at Brinkley who when you first meet him will give you the impression that he plans to convert you into a light snack between his regular meals. Pay no attention. It’s all eyewash. His belligerent attitude is simply—" Sound and fury signifying nothing, sir?" That’s it. Pure swank. A few civil words, and he will be grappling you . . . What’s the expression I’ve heard you use?" Grappling me to his soul with hoops of steel, sir?" In the first two minutes. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, but he has to put up a front because his name’s Poppet. One can readily appreciate that when a dog hears himself addressed day in and day out as Poppet, he feels he must throw his weight about. Is self-respect demands it." Precisely, sir." You’ll like Poppet. Nice dog. Wears his ears inside out. Why do dachshunds wear their ears inside out?" I could not say, sir." Nor me. I’ve often wondered.

The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, "This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but if I'm such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay," you're sunk. If they aren't in interesting situations, characters can't be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them." (Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)

Mr Wisdom,' said the girl who had led him into the presence. 'Ah,' said Howard Saxby, and there was a pause of perhaps three minutes, during which his needles clicked busily. 'Wisdom, did she say?' 'Yes. I wrote "Cocktail Time"' 'You couldn't have done better,' said Mr Saxby cordially. 'How's your wife, Mr Wisdom?' Cosmo said he had no wife. 'Surely?' "I'm a bachelor.' Then Wordsworth was wrong. He said you were married to immortal verse. Excuse me a moment,' murmured Mr Saxby, applying himself to the sock again. 'I'm just turning the heel. Do you knit?' 'No.' 'Sleep does. It knits the ravelled sleave of care.' (After a period of engrossed knitting, Cosmo coughs loudly to draw attention to his presence.) 'Goodness, you made me jump!' he (Saxby) said. 'Who are you?' 'My name, as I have already told you, is Wisdom' 'How did you get in?' asked Mr Saxby with a show of interest. 'I was shown in.' 'And stayed in. I see, Tennyson was right. Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers. Take a chair.' 'I have.' 'Take another,' said Mr Saxby hospitably.