Playwrights From England

"[About Pinkie's inability to empathise] The imagination hadn't awoken. That was his strength. He couldn't see through other people's eyes, or feel with their nerves. Only the music made him uneasy."

"[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe'."

"Man is made by the places in which he lives..."

"[After Hale's cremation] She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. Fred dropped indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept."

"[Priest at Hale's cremation] "...our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit.""

"… it was the little things which tripped you up."

"[Ida] "...It's a good world if you don't weaken.""

"[Re Hale] He only felt his loneliness after his third gin."

"There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love when one finds it."

"Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline."

"The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief."

"You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?"

"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."

"A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious."

"That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer."

"The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved."

"The world is not black and white. More like black and grey."

"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought."

"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition."

"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane."

"Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered."

"Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror."

"In view of the pain it gives most writers to say a good word about other writers, perhaps the most eloquent testimonials to Wodehouse's talent are the warm compliments that have been paid him by colleagues, among them Rudyard Kipling, Agatha Christie, George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge, Peter Quennell, Ogden Nash, and Evelyn Waugh."

"The breadth of Wodehouse's appeal is also exceptional; down through the years, his hard-core fans have ranged from Bertrand Russell to Bix Beiderbecke, the great jazz cornettist, who could quote page after page from his stories. Herbert Asquith, during the difficult weeks that followed his defeat in 1918, found solace in reading Wodehouse, and two other British Prime Ministers, Arthur Balfour and Stanley Baldwin, were also ardent Wodehousians."

"For Mr Wodehouse there has been no Fall of Man; no "aboriginal calamity". His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled. The chef Anatole prepares the ambrosia for the immortals of high Olympus. Mr Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in."

"In a hundred years' time "the kind of man who reads P. G. Wodehouse for pleasure" may become synonymous with an extravagantly fastidious taste. And that is indeed as it should be. What can be more enviable than to enjoy the rewards of limitless contemporary popularity with the confidence, in the distant years, when copyrights have lapsed and royalties lost their importance, of a serene ascent into a rarer atmosphere, a little above the clouds, away from the crush where only the keen and the noble can follow?"

"[T]he University [of Oxford] in conferring an honorary degree on Mr P. G. Wodehouse has suddenly exerted its failing strength in an action worthy of its tradition. It is speaking, as one of its most splendid functions to speak, for the educated class of the country, in recognizing Mr Wodehouse's place in literature, not perhaps, as Mr Agate claims, as "a little below Shakespeare's and any distance you like above anybody else's", but certainly as the equal among his contemporaries, as Sir Max Beerbohm and Mgr Knox, and high in the historic succession of the master-craftsmen of his trade."

"The idiosyncrasy is in the false concord of phrases, the syntax of stately with vernacular, a Bible quotation collapsing into Fourth Form slang, the great Amen on the organ followed by a few notes of piffling piccolo voluntary. If you analyse the feeble mind that Wodehouse has given Bertie Wooster, you find that its feebleness, to our joy, is Bertie's inability to connect his teeming tags and images prosaically. The result is an English unofficial prose fluent with mad alienations, most savoury similes, but innocent, vulnerable and often wonderfully vivid."

"It is amusing to read the various wails about the villainy of Wodehouse. The harm done to England's cause and to England's dignity is not the poor man's babble in Berlin, but the acceptance of him by a childish part of the people and the academic government of Oxford, dead from the chin up, as a person of any importance whatsoever in English humorous literature, or any literature at all. It is an ironic twist of retribution on those who banished Joyce and honoured Wodehouse. If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea. If Berlin thinks the poor fish great, so much the better for us."

"Wodehouse is caught between the two poles of the modern age – mischievous but not vulgar, inoffensive but not anodyne. His gifts cannot be captured by the screen, the ultimate medium of the modern age, either. That's not to say he's outdated. His genius has been obscured, not promoted, by television exposure. Read him; don’t watch him. He is still timelessly funny."

"A novelist has now, therefore, to choose between these alternatives: either to deal in stereotyped humour (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the works of P. G. Wodehouse are examples of ingenious variations on a laugh in one place—cf. humour of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which communicated a whole comic attitude)."

"His object is comedy in the most modern sense of that word: that is, his object is to present the laughable, and he does this with such mastery and skill that he nearly always approaches, and often reaches, perfection."

"Now in the course of this broadcast I gave as the best writer of English now alive, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse... Now the end of writing is the production in the reader's mind of a certain image and a certain emotion. And the means towards that end are the use of words in any particular language; and the complete use of that medium is the choosing of the right words and the putting of them into the right order. It is this which Mr. Wodehouse does better, in the English language, than anyone else alive; or at any rate than anyone else whom I have read for many years past."

"Wodehouse irritated earnest progressives, who saw him as a buffoon pandering to nostalgia and romanticizing the most effete elements in the upper classes."

"Wodehouse revived light English prose. He was the only Englishman who saw how the American vernacular revitalized the English language. Wodehouse's metaphors and similes replaced the epigram... Adoring public school life he remained the irrepressible fifth-former to the end of time to whom high-brows, Freud, aunts, magnates, club-bores and the Right Hon. "who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'When!'" were God-given targets for ragging."

"I don't condone murder but your charming use of Latin and ballyhoo has left me nostalgic for the whimsical class divisions of P. G. Wodehouse, and I've forgotten your homicidal idiosyncrasies already!."

"Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase."

"There are girls, few perhaps but to be found if one searches carefully, who when their advice is ignored and disaster ensues, do not say "I told you so". Mavis was not of their number."

"It just showed once again that half the world doesn’t know how the other three quarters live."

"She had a beaky nose, tight thin lips, and her eye could have been used for splitting logs in the teak forests of Borneo."

"I had not failed to interpret the significance of that dark frown, that bitten lip and those flashing eyes, nor the way the willowy figure had quivered, indicating, unless she had caught a chill, that she was as sore as a sunburned neck."

"My Aunt Agatha, for instance, is tall and thin and looks rather like a vulture in the Gobi desert, while Aunt Dahlia is short and solid, like a scrum half in the game of Rugby football. In disposition, too, they differ widely. Aunt Agatha is cold and haughty, though presumably unbending a bit when conducting human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, as she is widely rumoured to do, and her attitude towards me has always been that of an austere governess, causing me to feel as if I were six years old and she had just caught me stealing jam from the jam cupboard: whereas Aunt Dahlia is as jovial and bonhomous as a dame in a Christmas pantomime."

"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."

"‘You’re one of those guys who can make a party just by leaving it. It’s a great gift.’"

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

"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..."

"A man, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of some twenty-eight summers, he gave the impression at the moment of having experienced at least that number of very hard winters."

"As is so often the case with butlers, there was a good deal of Beach. Julius Caesar, who liked to have men about him who were fat, would have taken to him at once. He was a man who had made two chins grow where only one had been before, and his waistcoat swelled like the sail of a racing yacht."

"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."