P. G. Wodehouse Quotes

379 Sourced Quotes

He had that self-reproachful feeling of having been remiss which comes to Generals who wake up one morning to discover that they have carelessly allowed themselves to be outflanked.

P. G. Wodehouse
It ought to be a criminal offence for women to dye their hair. Especially red. What the devil do women do that sort of thing for?

P. G. Wodehouse
When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff.

P. G. Wodehouse
I suppose he must have taken about a nine or something in hats. Shows what a rotten thing it is to let your brain develop too much.

P. G. Wodehouse
Breakfast had been prepared by the kitchen maid, an indifferent performer who had used the scorched earth policy on the bacon again.

P. G. Wodehouse
It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.

P. G. Wodehouse
I attribute my whole success in life to a rigid observance of the fundamental rule — Never have yourself tattooed with any woman's name, not even her initials.

P. G. Wodehouse
There was practically one handwriting common to the whole school when it came to writing lines. It resembled the movements of a fly that had fallen into an ink-pot, and subsequently taken a little brisk exercise on a sheet of foolscap by way of restoring the circulation.

P. G. Wodehouse
His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted candle.

P. G. Wodehouse
He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.

P. G. Wodehouse
Besides, isn't there something in the book of rules about a man may not marry his cousin? Or am I thinking of grandmothers?
"My dear Tuppy, does one bandy a woman's name?"
"One does if one doesn't want one's ruddy head pulled off."
I saw that it was a special case.

P. G. Wodehouse
"Oh, look," she said. She was a confirmed Oh-looker. I had noticed this at Cannes, where she had drawn my attention in this manner on various occasions to such diverse objects as a French actress, a Provençal filling station, the sunset over the Estorels, Michael Arlen, a man selling coloured spectacles, the deep velvet blue of the Mediterranean, and the late mayor of New York in a striped one-piece bathing suit.

P. G. Wodehouse
She laughed - a solo effort. Nothing in the prevailing circumstances made me feel like turning it into a duet.

P. G. Wodehouse
He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

P. G. Wodehouse
She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season.

P. G. Wodehouse
It was a harsh, rasping voice, in its timbre not unlike a sawmill.

P. G. Wodehouse
Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum.

P. G. Wodehouse
Say what you will, there is something fine about our old aristocracy. I'll bet Trotsky couldn't hit a moving secretary with an egg on a dark night.

P. G. Wodehouse
The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting 'Heil, Spode!' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?

P. G. Wodehouse
I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism.

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.

P. G. Wodehouse
The brains of members of the Press departments of motion-picture studios resemble soup at a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them.

P. G. Wodehouse
Whenever I meet Ukridge's Aunt Julia I have the same curious illusion of having just committed some particularly unsavoury crime and—what is more—of having done it with swollen hands, enlarged feet, and trousers bagging at the knee on a morning when I had omitted to shave.

P. G. Wodehouse
Blizzard was of the fine old school of butlers. His appearance suggested that for fifteen years he had not let a day pass without its pint of port. He radiated port and pop-eyed dignity. He had splay feet and three chins, and when he walked his curving waistcoat preceded him like the advance guard of some royal procession.

P. G. Wodehouse
I don't say I've got much of a soul, but, such as it is, I'm perfectly satisfied with the little chap. I don't want people fooling about with it. 'Leave it alone,' I say. 'Don't touch it. I like it the way it is.'

P. G. Wodehouse
It's not that I don't trust you, Dunstable, it's simply that I don't trust you.

P. G. Wodehouse
You are falling into your old error, Jeeves, of thinking that Gussie is a parrot. Fight against this. I shall add the oz.

P. G. Wodehouse
One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.

P. G. Wodehouse
She snorted with a sudden violence which twenty-four hours earlier would have unmanned me completely. Even in my present tolerably robust condition, it affected me like one of those gas explosions which slay six.

P. G. Wodehouse
Mike nodded. A sombre nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812 and said, "So, you're back from Moscow, eh?

P. G. Wodehouse