Quotes from P. G. Wodehouse

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 talk French.

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

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.

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

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

Alcohol is a misunderstood vitamin.

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 coziness.

Do men who have got all their marbles go swimming in lakes with their clothes on?

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

At five minutes to eleven on the morning named he was at the station, a false beard and spectacles shielding his identity from the public eye. If you had asked him he would have said that he was a Scotch business man. As a matter a fact, he looked far more like a motor-car coming through a haystack.

Henry glanced hastily at the mirror. Yes, he did look rather old. He must have overdone some of the lines on his forehead. He looked something between a youngish centenarian and a nonagenarian who had seen a good deal of trouble.

His was a life which lacked, perhaps, the sublimer emotions which raised Man to the level of the gods, but it was undeniably an extremely happy one. He never experienced the thrill of ambition fulfilled, but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of ambition frustrated....

Routine is the death to heroism.

The village of Market Blandings is one of those sleepy hamlets which modern progress has failed to touch... The church is Norman, and the intelligence of the majority of the natives palaeozoic.

To my daughter Leonora without whose never failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been completed in half the time.

I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.