P. G. Wodehouse Quotes

Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum.

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

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

It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

I always advise people never to give advice.

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

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

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

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.

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 was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.

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

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.

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 drawbacks to life is that it contains moments when one is compelled to tell the truth.

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

Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Slice him where you like, a hellhound is always a hellhound.

Rugby football is a game I can't claim absolutely to understand in all its niceties, if you know what I mean. I can follow the broad, general principles, of course. I mean to say, I know that the main scheme is to work the ball down the field somehow and deposit it over the line at the other end and that, in order to squalch this programme, each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellow man which, if done elsewhere, would result in 14 days without the option, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant—better left unstirred.

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

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.

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

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.

There are three things in the world that he held in the smallest esteem - slugs, poets and caddies with hiccups.

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

...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.

My motto is 'Love and let love' - with the one stipulation that people who love in glass-houses should breathe on the windows.

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

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

If you could call the thing a horse. If it hadn't shown a flash of speed in the straight, it would have got mixed up with the next race.

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.

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

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.

Why do dachshunds wear their ears inside out?

I always strive, when I can, to spread sweetness and light. There have been several complaints about it.

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?