P. G. Wodehouse Quotes

379 Sourced Quotes

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
He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner-gong due any moment.

P. G. Wodehouse
I was in rare fettle and the heart had touched a new high. I don't know anything that braces one up like finding you haven't got to get married after all.

P. G. Wodehouse
He gave her some chocolates to eat in the Tube. He entertained her with amazing statistics, culled from the weekly paper which he bought on Tuesdays. He was, in short, the perfect lover.

P. G. Wodehouse
They were real golfers, for real golf is a thing of the spirit, not of mere mechanical excellence of stroke.

P. G. Wodehouse
I'd always thought her half-baked, but now I think they didn't even put her in the oven.

P. G. Wodehouse
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.

P. G. Wodehouse
Dark hair fell in a sweep over his forehead. He looked like a man who would write vers libre, as indeed he did.

P. G. Wodehouse
I don't know if you have ever seen a tiger of the jungle drawing a deep breath preparatory to doing a swan dive and landing with both the feet on the backbone of one of the minor fauna. Probably not, nor, as a matter of fact, have I.

P. G. Wodehouse
What you want, my lad, and what you're going to get are two very different things.

P. G. Wodehouse
... "someone tried to assasinate Lenin with a rewolwer. That is our (Russia's) great national sport, you see."

P. G. Wodehouse
He's engaged to be married to Stiffy Byng, and his long years of football should prove an excellent preparation for setting up house with her. The way I look at it is that when a fellow has had plug-uglies in cleated boots doing a Shuffle-off-to-Buffalo on his face Saturday after Saturday since he was a slip of a boy, he must get to fear nothing, not even marriage with a girl like Stiffy, who from early childhood has seldom let the sun go down without starting some loony enterprise calculated to bleach the hair of one and all.

P. G. Wodehouse
To persons of spirit like ourselves the only happy marriage is that which is based on a firm foundation of almost incessant quarrelling.

P. G. Wodehouse
I am Psmith," said the old Etonian reverently. "There is a preliminary P before the name. This, however, is silent. Like the tomb. Compare such words as ptarmigan, psalm, and phthisis.

P. G. Wodehouse
Just another proof, of course, of what I often say - it takes all sorts to make a world.

P. G. Wodehouse
Oh, Jeeves,' I said; 'about that check suit.' Yes, sir?' Is it really a frost?' A trifle too bizarre, sir, in my opinion.' But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.' Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.' He's supposed to be one of the best men in London.' I am saying nothing against his moral character, sir.

P. G. Wodehouse
Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what d'you-call-it.

P. G. Wodehouse
His whole aspect was that of a man who has unexpectedly been struck by lightning.

P. G. Wodehouse
For the first time since sudden love had thrown them into each other's arms, she had found herself beginning to wonder if her Blair was quite the godlike superman she had supposed. There even flashed through her mind a sinister speculation as to whether, when you came right down to it, he wasn't something of a pill.

P. G. Wodehouse
In boxing the right cross-counter is distinctly one of those things it is more blessed to give than to receive.

P. G. Wodehouse
I clutched at the brow. The mice in my interior had now got up an informal dance and were buck-and-winging all over the place like a bunch of Nijinskys.

P. G. Wodehouse
Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.

P. G. Wodehouse
I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover-the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all.

P. G. Wodehouse