P. G. Wodehouse Quotes

379 Sourced Quotes

It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.

P. G. Wodehouse
Aunt Agatha, who eats broken bottles and wears barbed wire next to the skin.

P. G. Wodehouse
I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

P. G. Wodehouse
I've seen him a couple of times in the arena, and was profoundly impressed by his virtuosity. Rugby football is more or less a sealed book to me, I never having gone in for it, but even I could see he was good. The lissomness with which he moved hither and thither was most impressive, as was his homicidal ardour when doing what I believe is called tackling. Like the Canadian Mounted Police he always got his man, and when he did so the air was vibrant with the excited cries of the morticians in the audience making bids for the body.

P. G. Wodehouse
It is true of course, that I have a will of iron, but it can be switched off if the circumstances seem to demand it.

P. G. Wodehouse
The light from the big window fell right on the picture. I took a good look at it. Then I shifted a bit nearer and took another look. Then I went back to where I had been at first, because it hadn't seemed quite so bad from there.

P. G. Wodehouse
He then gave a hideous laugh and added that, if anybody was interested in his plans, he was going to join the Foreign Legion, that cohort of the damned in which broken men may toil and die and dying, forget. 'Beau Widgeon?' said the Egg, impressed. 'What ho!'

P. G. Wodehouse
'I want to know what the devil you mean by keeping coming into my private apartment, taking up space which I require for other purposes and interrupting me when I am chatting with my personal friends. Really one gets about as much privacy in this house as a strip-tease dancer.'

P. G. Wodehouse
Attila the Hun might have broken off his engagement to her, but nobody except Attila the Hun, and he only on one of his best mornings.

P. G. Wodehouse
He trusted neither of them as far as he could spit, and he was a poor spitter, lacking both distance and control.

P. G. Wodehouse
A golfer needs a loving wife to whom he can describe the day's play through the long evening.

P. G. Wodehouse
You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower.

P. G. Wodehouse
No novelists any good except me. Sovietski — yah! Nastikoff — bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.

P. G. Wodehouse
Some time ago," he said, "—how long it seems! — I remember saying to a young friend of mine of the name of Spiller, 'Comrade Spiller, never confuse the unusual with the impossible.' It is my guiding rule in life.

P. G. Wodehouse
'Stinko, is he?'
'Not perhaps stinko, but certainly effervescent.'

P. G. Wodehouse
It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

P. G. Wodehouse
The ideas of debtor and creditor as to what constitutes a good time never coincide.

P. G. Wodehouse
I started back to the house, and in the drive I met Jeeves. He was at the wheel of Stiffy's car. Beside him, looking like a Scotch elder rebuking sin, was the dog Bartholomew.

P. G. Wodehouse
I goggled. Her words did not appear to make sense. They seemed the mere aimless vapouring of an aunt who has been sitting out in the sun without a hat.
"You're pulling my leg."
"I am not pulling your leg. Nothing would induce me to touch your beastly leg."

P. G. Wodehouse
Whatever may be said in favour of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.

P. G. Wodehouse
One prefers, of course, on all occasions to be stainless and above reproach, but, failing that, the next best thing is unquestionably to have got rid of the body.

P. G. Wodehouse
Nothing so surely introduces a sour note into a wedding ceremony as the abrupt disappearance of the groom in a cloud of dust.

P. G. Wodehouse
'Yes, sir,' said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend.

P. G. Wodehouse
Jeeves, you really are a specific dream-rabbit." "Thank you, miss. I am glad to have given satisfaction.

P. G. Wodehouse
He was not a man who prattled readily, especially in a foreign tongue. He gave the impression that each word was excavated from his interior by some up-to-date process of mining.

P. G. Wodehouse
As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps and Uncle James's letter about Cousin Mabel's peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle ('Please read this carefully and send it on Jane') the clan has a tendency to ignore me. It's one of the advantages I get from being a bachelor - and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that.

P. G. Wodehouse
One of the Georges - I forget which - once said that a certain number of hours' sleep each night - I cannot recall at the moment how many - made a man something which for the time being has slipped my memory.

P. G. Wodehouse
'Oh Brancepeth,' said the girl, her voice trembling, 'why haven't you any money? If only you had the merest pittance - enough for a flat in Mayfair and a little weekend place in the country somewhere and a couple of good cars and a villa in the South of France and a bit of trout fishing on some decent river, I would risk all for love.'

P. G. Wodehouse
To say that his conscience was clear would be inaccurate, for he did not have a conscience, but he had what was much better, an alibi...

P. G. Wodehouse
Golf acts as a corrective against sinful pride. I attribute the insane arrogance of the later Roman Emperors almost entirely to the fact that, never having played golf, they never knew that strange chastening humility which is engendered by a topped chip shot. If Cleopatra had been ousted in the first round of the Ladies' Singles, we should have heard a lot less of her proud imperiousness.

P. G. Wodehouse