Quotes from P.G. Wodehouse

All nice girls sketch a little.

I give you my word that, until I started to tramp the place with this child, I never had a notion that it was such a difficult job restoring a son to his parents. How kidnappers ever get caught is a mystery to me. I searched Marvis Bay like a bloodhound, but nobody came forward to claim the infant. You would have thought, from the lack of interest in him, that he was stopping there all by himself in a cottage of his own.

Good works? About the village, sir. Reading to the bedridden - chatting with the sick - that sort of thing, sir. We can but trust that good results will ensue. Yes, I suppose so, I said doubtfully. But, by gosh, if I were a sick man I'd hate to have a looney like young Bingo coming and gibbering at my bedside.

Reflect, old man! We have been pals for years. Your mother likes me. No, she doesn't. Well, anyway, we were at school together and you owe me a tenner. Oh, well, he said in a resigned sort of voice.

Mother always used to say, 'If you want to succeed in life, please the women. They are the real bosses. The men don't count.

One uses the verb 'descend' advisedly, for what is required is some word suggesting instantaneous activity. About Baxter's progress from the second floor to the first there was nothing halting or hesitating. He, so to speak, did it now. Planting

Normally he was fond of most things. He was a good-natured and cheerful young man, who liked life and the great majority of those who lived it contemporaneously with himself. He had no enemies and many friends. But today he had noticed from the moment he had got out of bed that something was amiss with the world. Either he was in the grip of some divine discontent due to the highly developed condition of his soul, or else he had a grouch. One of the two.

Jeeves, I said, those spats. Yes, sir? You really dislike them? Intensely, sir. You don't think time might induce you to change your views? No, sir. All right, then. Very well. Say no more. You may burn them. Thank you very much, sir. I have already done so. Before breakfast this morning. A quiet grey is far more suitable, sir. Thank you, sir.

However devoutly a girl may worship the man of her choice, there always comes a time when she feels an irresistible urge to haul off and let him have it in the neck.

I don't mind people talking rot in my presence, but it must not be utter rot.

For a time the broken heart, and then suddenly the healing conviction that one is jolly well out of it.

Hypatia, like all girls who intend to be good wives, made it a practice to look on any suggestions thrown out by her future lord and master as fatuous and futile.

I must say my heart leaped up, as Jeeves tells me his does when he beholds a rainbow in the sky.

Yes, by damn! It's too bad! cried the whiskered marvel. You careless old woman! You give my hotel bad names, would you or wasn't it? Tomorrow you leave my hotel, by great Scotland! ... I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.

But, Ed! Say! Are you going to let him get away with it? Am I going to let him get away with it! said Mr. Cootes, annoyed by the foolish question. Wake me up in the night and ask me! But what are you going to do? Do! said Mr. Cootes. Do! I'll tell you what I'm going to... He paused, and the stern resolve that shone in his face seemed to flicker. Say, what the hell am I going do? he went on somewhat weakly.

On the cue 'five aunts' I had given at the knees a trifle, for the thought of being confronted with such a solid gaggle of aunts, even if those of another, was an unnerving one. Reminding myself that in this life it is not aunts that matter, but the courage that one brings to them, I pulled myself together.

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.

This woman always made Freddie feel as if he were being disemboweled by some clumsy amateur.

How did it all end?' 'Oh, I got away with my life. Still, what's life?' 'Life's all right.

I started m-p-h-ing it homewards in a thrice

Lord Chesterfield said that since he had had the full use of his reason nobody had heard him laugh. I don't suppose you have read Lord Chesterfield's 'Letters To His Son'? ...Well, of course I hadn't. Bertram Wooster does not read other people's letters. If I were employed in the post office I wouldn't even read the postcards.

The spine, and I do not attempt to conceal the fact, had become soluble, in the last degree.

cats on hot bricks could take hints from me

I have never written a novel yet...without doing 40,000 words or more and finding they were all wrong and going back and starting again, and this after filling 400 words with notes, mostly delirious, before getting into anything in the nature of a coherent scenario.