P.G. Wodehouse Quotes

Enjoy the top 765 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by P.G. Wodehouse.

“I dont know why it is, but women who have anything to do with Opera, even if theyre only studying for it, always appear to run to surplus poundage.”
— P.G. Wodehouse —

“And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season

— 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 of 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 suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“Oh, I don't know, you know, don't you know?”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“[I'm] as broke as the ten commandments.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

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

— 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

“It's not that I don't trust you, Dunstable, it's simply that I don't trust you.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

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

— 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

“I shoved on a dressing-gown, and flew downstairs like a mighty, rushing wind.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“Conversationally, I am like a clockwork toy. I have to be set going.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“The Duke of Dunstable had one-way pockets.
He would walk ten miles in the snow to chisel an orphan out of tuppence.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“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.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“Well, why do you want a political career? Have you ever been in the House of Commons and taken a good square look at the inmates? As weird a gaggle of freaks and sub-humans as was ever collected in one spot.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“I don't know why it is, but women who have anything to do with Opera, even if they're only studying for it, always appear to run to surplus poundage.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“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.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“Nothing to be done about it except give her a reproachful look. I did this. It made no impression whatever, and she proceeded.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

You go away and have a nice cup of hot tea,' said the agent, soothingly, 'and you'll be as right as anything in the morning.

— P.G. Wodehouse

“Had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“Alf Todd," said Ukridge, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery, "has about as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild cat's left ear with a red-hot needle.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“Won't you have an egg or something? Or a sausage or something? Or something?'
'No, thank you.'
She spoke as if she belonged to an anti-sausage society or a league for the suppression of eggs..
There was another slightly frappe silence.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

They walked on in silence. Katie's heart was beating with a rapidity that forbade speech. Nothing like this very direct young man had ever happened to her before. She had grown so accustomed to regarding herself as something too insignificant and unattractive for the notice of the lordly male that she was overwhelmed. She had a vague feeling that there was a mistake somewhere. It surely could not be she who was proving so alluring to this fairy prince. The novelty of the situation frightened her.

— P.G. Wodehouse

“A dog without influence or private means, if he is to make his way in the world, must have either good looks or amiability.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

Writing my books I enjoy. It is the thinking them out that is apt to blot the sunshine from my life.

— P.G. Wodehouse

“Mother always used to say, 'If you want to succeed in life, please the women. They are the real bosses. The men don't count.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“But I say, really, you know, I am an old friend of the family. Why, by Jove, now I remember, there's a photograph of me in the drawing-room. Well, I mean, that shows you!"
"If there is," said the policeman.
"I've never seen it," said the parlourmaid.
I absolutely hated this girl.
"You would have seen it if you had done your dusting more conscientiously," I said severely. And I meant it to sting, by Jove!
"It is not a parlourmaid's place to dust the drawing-room," she sniffed haughtily.
"No," I said bitterly. "It seems to be a parlourmaid's place to lurk about and hang about and - er - waste her time fooling about in the garden with policemen who ought to be busy about their duties elsewhere."
"It's a parlourmaid's place to open the front door to visitors. Them that don't come in through windows."
I perceived that I was getting the loser's end of the thing.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“Few things are more difficult in this world for a young man than the securing of an introduction to the right girl under just the right conditions. When he is looking his best he is presented to her in the midst of a crowd, and is swept away after a rapid hand-shake. When there is no crowd he has toothache, or the sun has just begun to make his nose peel. Thousands of young lives have been saddened in this manner.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“How did it all end?'
'Oh, I got away with my life. Still, what's life?'
'Life's all right.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

Once in every few publishing seasons there is an Event. For no apparent reason, the great heart of the Public gives a startled jump, and the public's great purse is emptied to secure copies of some novel which has stolen into the world without advance advertising and whose only claim to recognition is that The Licensed Victuallers' Gazette has stated in a two-line review that it is 'readable'.

— P.G. Wodehouse

“He was rigidly truthful, where the issue concerned only himself. Where it was a case of saving a friend, he was prepared to act in a manner reminiscent of an American expert witness.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“I turned round and Jeeves shied like a startled mustang.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“Beggars approached the task of trying to persuade perfect strangers to bear the burden of their maintenance with that optimistic vim which makes all the difference. It was one of those happy mornings.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“He will lunch with you at your flat tomorrow at one-thirty. Please remember that he drinks no wine, strongly disapproves of smoking, and can only eat the simplest food, owing to an impaired digestion. Do not offer him coffee, for he considers it the root of half the nerve-trouble in the world."
"I should think a dog-biscuit and a glass of water would about meet the case, what?"
"Bertie!"
"Oh, all right. Merely persiflage."
"Now it is precisely that sort of idiotic remark that would be calculated to arouse Sir Roderick's worst suspicions.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

What would Jeeves do that for?"
"It struck me as rummy, too." ...
"I mean to say, it's nothing to Jeeves what sort of a face you have!"
"No!" said Cyril. He spoke a little coldly, I fancied. I don't know why. "Well, I'll be popping. Toodle-oo!

— P.G. Wodehouse

“My name's Bassington-Bassington, and the jolly old Bassington-Bassingtons - I mean the Bassington-Bassingtons aren't accustomed - "
Old Blumenfeld told him in a few brief words pretty much what he thought of the Bassington-Bassingtons and what they weren't accustomed to ...
"You got to work good for my pop!" said the stout child, waggling his head reprovingly at Cyril.
"I don't want any bally cheek from you!" said Cyril, gurgling a bit.
"What's that?" barked old Blumenfeld. "Do you understand that this boy is my son?"
"Yes, I do," said Cyril. "And you both have my sympathy!"
"You're fired!" bellowed old Blumenfeld, swelling a good bit more. "Get out of my theatre!”

— P.G. Wodehouse

Some girls are like ants in your pants

— P.G. Wodehouse

“The cells smell is a great feature of French prisons. Ours in No.44 was one of those fine broad-shouldered up and coming young smells, which stand on both feet and look the world in the eye. We became very fond and proud of it.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“When Nature makes a chump like dear old Bobbie, she's proud of him, and doesn't want her handiwork disturbed. She gives him a sort of natural armour to protect him against outside interference. And that armour is shortness of memory. Shortness of memory keeps a man a chump, when, but for it, he might cease to be one.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

She did drive me in the Park the other day. I thought it rather a hopeful

— P.G. Wodehouse

“Who was that lad they used to try to make me read at Oxford? Ship- Shop- Schopenhauer. That's the name. A grouch of the most pronounced description.”