Wodehouse Funny Quotes

I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me. But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.

Cheer up, Crips, and keep smiling. That’s the thing to do. If you go through life with a smile on your face, you’ll be amazed how many people will come up to you and say ‘What the hell are you grinning about? What’s so funny?’ Make you a lot of new friends.

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.

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.

She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.

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.

He had the look of a frustrated tiger whose personal physician had recommended a strict vegetarian diet.

He's such a dear, Mr. Garnet. A beautiful, pure, bred Persian. He has taken prizes." "He's always taking something - generally food.

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.

... 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.

A man, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of some twenty-eight summers, he gave the impression at the moment of having experienced at least that number of very hard winters

His brow was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought and his air that of a man who, if he had said ''Hullo, girls'', would have said it like someone in a Russian drama announcing that Grandpapa had hanged himself in the barn.

In the circles in which I move it is pretty generally recognized that I am a resilient sort of bimbo, and in circumstances where others might crack beneath the strain, may frequently be seen rising on stepping-stones of my dead self to higher things.

I suppose you haven’t breakfasted?” “I have not yet breakfasted.” “Won’t you have an egg or something? Or a sausage or something? Or something?” “No, thank you.” She spoke as if she belonged to an anti-sausage society or a league for the suppression of eggs.

Bayliss resumed reading. He was one of those readers who, whether their subject be a murder case or funny anecdote, adopt a measured and sepulchral delivery which gives a suggestion of tragedy and horror to whatever they read. At the church he attended, children would turn pale and snuggle up to their mothers when he read.

Look in at the Drones and ask the first fellow you meet ''Can the fine spirit of the Woosters be crushed?'' and he will offer you attractive odds against such a contingency.

From the Hills of Fairyland soft music came. Or, if we must be exact, Maud spoke.

Constitutionally the laziest young devil in America, he had hit on a walk in life which enabled him to go the limit in that direction. He was a poet.

London late at night -- or even in the daytime, for that matter -- is no place for a man in scarlet tights.

perhaps there had been something a little obsessive about it, the way she’d consumed the shelves of the local library, Blyton to Jansson, C. S. Lewis to P. G. Wodehouse, Christie then du Maurier then the Brontës, reading indiscriminately but always passionately, so that even her dislikes were passionate. Dickens, she thought, was preachy and silly, like a teacher putting on funny voices, but never mind, here were Jane Austen and Sue Townsend, Ursula K. Le Guin and Jean M. Auel, and each Saturday morning she’d return her stack of library books, the maximum permitted, placing them on the counter, like a gambler cashing in chips.

As a rule, from what I’ve observed, the American captain of industry doesn’t do anything out of business hours. When he has put the cat out and locked up the office for the night, he just relapses into a state of coma from which he emerges only to start being a captain of industry again.

I don't understand a word you say. You're English, aren't you?" I admitted it. She didn't say a word. And somehow she did it in a way that made it worse than if she had spoken for hours. Somehow it was brought home to me that she didn't like Englishmen, and that if she had had to meet an Englishman, I was the one she'd have chosen last.

Bertie: Any message for him? Roderick Spode: Yes. Tell him I'm going to break his neck. Bertie: Break his neck, right. And, if he should ask why? Roderick Spode: He knows why. Because he is a butterfly, who toys with women's hearts and throws them away like soiled gloves! Bertie: Do butterflies do that? Roderick Spode: Are you trying to be funny?

Bertie : [on Gussie] Any message for him? Roderick Spode - 8th Earl of Sidcup: Yes. Tell him I'm going to break his neck. Bertie : Break his neck, right. And, if he should ask why? Roderick Spode - 8th Earl of Sidcup : He knows why. Because he is a butterfly, who toys with women's hearts and throws them away like soiled gloves! Bertie : Do butterflies do that? Roderick Spode - 8th Earl of Sidcup : Are you trying to be funny?

When Nature makes a chump like dear old Bobbie, she’s proud of him, and doesn’t want her handiwork disturbed. She gives him a sort of natural armour to protect him against outside interference. And that armour is shortness of memory. Shortness of memory keeps a man a chump when, but for it, he might cease to be one. Take my case, for instance. I’m a chump. Well, if I had remembered half the things people have tried to teach me during my life, my size in hats would be about number nine. But I didn’t. I forgot them. And it was just the same with Bobbie.

Sally's father,' explained Walter, 'got me a job in a bank. I can't tell you what I suffered for three whole days. It was like a PG Wodehouse novel, only not funny at all, or perhaps I've no sense of humour. To begin with, I had to get up at eight every morning. One had much better be dead, you know. Then, my dear, the expense! I can't tell you what it cost me in taxis alone, not to mention the suit I had to buy - a most lugubrious black affair. There was no time to get back here for luncheon, and I couldn't go all day without seeing Sally, so we went to a restaurant that was recommended to us called "Simkins," too putting off. Sally was given some perfectly raw meat with blood instead of gravy, and naturally she nearly fainted, and she had to have brandy before I could get her out of the place. By then we were so upset that we felt we must go to the Ritz in order to be soothed, which meant more taxis. In the end we reckoned that those three days had cost me every penny of thirty pounds, so I gave it up. I can't afford that sort of thing, you know.

I read everything, both serious and funny. Dickens, Thackeray, Rider Haggard, PG Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe, and the endless wailing of Virginia Woolf, thin terrible books where nothing happened.