Quotes from P.G. Wodehouse

You can't tell me if there are any special subjects to avoid when talking to him, can you?' 'Special subjects?' 'Well, you know how it is with a stranger. You say it's a fine day, and he goes all white and tense, because you've reminded him that it was on a fine day that his wife eloped with the chauffeur.

He looked like a vulture dissatisfied with its breakfast corpse.

I wonder the food didn't turn to ashes in our mouths! Eggs! Muffins! Sardines! All wrung from the bleeding lips of the starving poor! Oh, I say! What a beastly idea!... Jeeves came in to clear away, and found me sitting among the ruins. It was all very well for Comrade Butt to knock the food, but he had pretty well finished the ham; and if you had shoved the remainder of the jam into the bleeding lips of the starving poor it would hardly have made them sticky.

I couldn't have made a better shot, if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he is a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living at Clapham.

She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said, Oh, woman in our hours of ease tum tumty tiddly something please, when something something something brow, a something something something thou.

Gussie and I, as I say, had rather lost touch, but all the same I was exercised about the poor fish, as I am about all my pals, close or distant, who find themselves treading upon Life's banana skins.

The boy is of an outspoken disposition, and had made an opprobrious remark respecting my personal appearance. What did he say about your appearance? I have forgotten, sir, said Jeeves, with a touch of austerity. But it was opprobrious.

You can't fling the hands up in a passionate gesture when you are driving a car at fifty miles an hour. Otherwise, I should have done so.

There's too much of that where-every-prospect-pleases-and-only-man-is-vile stuff buzzing around for my taste.

That's always the way in this world. The chappies you'd like to lend money to won't let you, whereas the chappies you don't want to lend it to will do everything except actually stand you on your head and lift the specie out of your pockets.

A chap's bedroom – you can't get way from it – is his castle, and he has every right to look askance if gargoyles come glaring in at him.

I was in that painful condition which occurs when one has lost one's first wind and has not yet got one's second.

Aunt Agatha's demeanor now was rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.

Good Lord, Jeeves! Is there anything you don't know?' 'I couldn't say, sir.

The cosy glow which had been enveloping the Duke became shot through by a sudden chill. It was as if he had been luxuriating in a warm shower bath, and some hidden hand had turned on the cold tap.

He was in the frame of mind when a weaker man would have started writing poetry.

Billie knew all. And, terrible though the fact is as an indictment of the male sex, when a woman knows all, there is invariably trouble ahead for some man.

If ever there was a bloke at the very mention of whose name it would be excusable for people to tremble like aspens, that bloke is Sir Roderick Glossop. He has an enormous bald head, all the hair which ought to be on it seeming to have run into his eyebrows, and his eyes go through you like a couple of Death Rays. How are you, how are you, how are you? I said, overcoming a slight desire to leap backwards out of the window.

But then, at meals, my attention is pretty well riveted on the foodstuffs.

He looks much more like a lobster than most lobsters do.

Just as you say, sir. There is a letter on the tray, sir. By Jove, Jeeves, that was practically potry. Rhymed, did you notice?

There is enough sadness in life without having fellows like Gussie Fink-Nottle going about in sea boots.

She was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hands over a husband's eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a morning head, and says: 'Guess who!

Hear that, Eustace? He wishes we were staying a good long time. I expect it will seem a good long time, said Eustace, philosophically.