Quotes from P.G. Wodehouse

It must have been something pretty bad. It took a lot to make them chuck people out of music-halls in 1887. "Your uncle specifically states that father had drunk a quart and a half of champagne before beginning the evening," she went on. "The book is full of stories like that. There is a dreadful one about Lord Emsworth." "Lord Emsworth! Not the one we know? Not the one at Blandings?

I'm not much of a ladies' man, but on this particular morning it seemed to me that what I really wanted was some charming girl to buzz up and ask me to save her from assassins or something. So that it was a bit of an anti-climax when I merely ran into young Bingo Little, looking perfectly foul in a crimson satin tie decorated with horseshoes.

And then, just when I was beginning to think I might safely pop down in that direction and gather up the dropped threads, so to speak, time, instead of working the healing wheeze, went and pulled the most awful bone and put the lid on it.

I say, Bertie, he said, after a pause of about an hour and a quarter. Hallo! Do you like the name Mabel? No. No? No. You don't think there's a kind of music in the word, like the wind rustling gently through the tree-tops? No. He seemed disappointed for a moment; then cheered up. Of course, you wouldn't. You always were a fat-headed worm without any soul, weren't you? Just as you say. Who is she? Tell me all.

Yes, sir. There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.

He had reached that condition of mind which the old Vikings used to call Berserk and which among modern Malays is termed running amok.

Tricky devils, these novelists. The ink gets into their heads.

I could see exactly what must have happened. Insert a liberal dose of mixed spirits in a normally abstemious man, and he becomes a force. He does not stand around, twiddling his fingers and stammering. He acts. I

It sometimes seems to me that in this life we've all got to have trouble sooner or later, and some of us gets it bit by bit, spread out thin, so to speak, and a few of us gets it in a lump—biff!

Between camaraderie and love there is a broad gulf.

Bertie, old man, said young Bingo earnestly, for the last two weeks I've been comforting the sick to such an extent that, if I had a brother and you brought him to me on a sick-bed at this moment, by Jove, old man, I'd heave a brick at him.

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.

Tell him my future is in his hands and that, if the wedding bells ring out, he can rely on me, even unto half my kingdom. Well, call it ten quid. Jeeves would exert himself with ten quid on the horizon, what?

He stood looking at the detective like Schopenhauer's butcher at the selected lamb.

The only thing that prevented a father's love from faltering was the fact that there was in his possession a photograph of himself at the same early age, in which he, too, looked like a homicidal fried egg. This proof that it was possible for a child, in spite of a rocky start, to turn eventually into a suave and polished boulevardier with finely chiselled features heartened him a good deal, causing him to hope for the best.

I'm not much of a ladies' man, but on this particular morning it seemed to me that what I really wanted was some charming girl to buzz up and ask me to save her from assassins or something.

I knew a man once who stammered, said Jimmy. He used to chew dog biscuit while he was speaking. It cured him. Besides being nutritious.

I see no percentage in your being alive. I wish you were a corpse, preferably a mangled one. I should like to dance on your remains.

No fair-minded girl objects to a certain tinge of jealousy. Kept within proper bounds, it is a compliment; it makes for piquancy; it is the gin in the ginger-beer of devotion. But it should be a condiment, not a fluid.

I hope that this will be a lesson to you not to go to fancy-dress balls as a lizard. If fewer people went about the place pretending to be lizards, this would be a better and sweeter world.

I am going to start at the bottom and work my way still further down.

When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza's latest.

If there's one thing I like, it's a quiet life. I'm not one of those fellows who get all restless and depressed if things aren't happening to them all the time. You can't make it too placid for me. Give me regular meals, a good show with decent music every now and then, and one or two pals to totter round with, and I ask no more.

We are living now in what is known as the Welfare State, which means – broadly – that everybody is completely destitute.