Quotes from Ben Schott

I've given him teddy bears, daisy chains, and heaps of adorable billikens, but I wonder if I'm missing the masculine angle.' 'It sounds as if you might be.

The seventh Earl of Sidcup is a sore for sighted eyes. It's as if evolution took a wrong turn, got stuck in a cul-de-sac, and just threw in the sponge.

That's the problem with educating girls. They never stop resorting to fact.

Moister than an oyster, Monty.

These sprouts are uneatable,' complained Lord Pallot. 'Why are sprouts always uneatable? Why do they plant them, pick them, cook them, and serve them if they are going to be uneatable? What, in other words, is the point of Brussels sprouts?

Actually, sir, Mr Fink-Nottle was asking after you. He's gone up to the bar.' 'Gussie, Gussie, Gussie,' I sang to myself while striding to the oasis, 'a guinea to a gooseberry the booby's in a pickle.' 'Bertie, I'm in a pickle.' 'What-ho, Gussie. I had a sort of feeling you might be.

Every so often, life presents a dilemma upon which the manuals of etiquette are woefully silent, and this was a snorter: whether it demonstrates better breeding to choke oneself into a frothy stupor or to expectorate one's dry Martini across four foot of well-polished bar, and six-foot-two of well-regarded barman.

So what do you need me to do?' 'For now, absolutely nothing.' 'I think I can manage that. For centuries we Woosters have done absolutely nothing under much more trying conditions.

As Sherlock Holmes once observed: When you've excluded the inevitable, whatever remains, however unpalatable, must be lunch.

Mr Wooster, you will have heard of the Official Secrets Act…?' 'Er–no.' 'Really?' He had evidently assumed his question to be rhetorical, and was fairly startled by my lacuna. 'Just goes to prove how effective it is, what?

If I'm researching something strange and rococo, I'll go to the London Library or the British Library and look it up in books.

I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.

I spend a lot of time looking at rococo books. And almanacs used to be huge sellers - they were pretty much part of the fabric of life. I thought, this is bizarre, I'd love to buy a book like this, and there isn't one. So I thought, all right then, this could be fun. I'll write an almanac.

The idea that I am cynical because I'm writing the books that I write is a bit like someone saying, 'What, you've done a second album? Oh, I see, cashing in on your first album, are you?' But I'm a musician! It's sort of what I do.

For me, photography only stopped because I was selling books.

I never read articles about my books.

A great deal of American T.V. viewed on Hulu, which is superb - '30 Rock', for instance, is on very good form.