All Quotes

"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."

"I agreed the situation was sticky. Indeed, offhand it was difficult to see how it could have been more glutinous."

"As plainly as if it had been the top line on the oculist’s chart I could see what the future held for Bertram."

"Before my eyes he wilted like a wet sock."

"And as he, too, seemed disinclined for chit-chat, we stood for some moments like a couple of Trappist monks who have run into each other at the dog races."

"Oh, Bertie, if I ever called you a brainless poop who ought to be given a scholarship at some lunatic asylum, I take back the words."

"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."

"Nannie Bruce, a tall, gangling light-heavyweight with a suggestion in her appearance of a private in the Grenadiers dressed up to play the title role in Charley’s Aunt, was one of those doggedly faithful retainers who adhere to almost all old families like barnacles to the hulls of ships...She was as much a fixture as the stone lions or the funny smell in the attic."

"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."

"Never put anything on paper, my boy, and never trust a man with a small black moustache."

"It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo."

"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."

"Oofy, thinking of the tenner he had given Freddie, writhed like an electric fan."

"...I mean to say, when a girl, offered a good man’s heart, laughs like a bursting paper bag and tells him not to be a silly ass, the good man is entitled, I think, to assume that the whole thing is off."

"Whenever there is a job to be taken on of a kind calculated to make Humanity shudder, the cry goes up, ‘Let Wooster do it.’"

"‘Are you sure?’ I said that sure was just what I wasn’t anything but."

"She’s all for not letting the sun go down without having started something calculated to stagger humanity."

"‘Suppose your Aunt Dahlia read in the paper one morning that you were going to be shot at sunrise.’ ‘I couldn’t be, I’m never up so early.’"

"‘When I say “mind,”’ said the blood relation, ‘I refer to the quarter-teaspoonful of brain which you might possibly find in her head if you sank an artesian well.’"

""Wellbeloved," she said, ... "I have been making inquiries about you in Market Blandings, and everyone to whom I have mentioned your name tells me that you are thoroughly untrustworthy, a man without scruples of any sort, who sticks at nothing and will do anything for money. ... At the Emsworth Arms, for instance, I was informed that you would sell your grandmother for twopence." George Cyril said that he did not have a grandmother, and seemed a good deal outraged by the suggestion that, if that relative had not long since gone to reside with the morning stars, he would have parted with her at such bargain-basement rates. A good grandmother should fetch at least a couple of bob."

"‘Don't you like this hat?‘ ‘No, sir.‘ ‘Well, I do,‘ I replied rather cleverly, and went out with it tilted just that merest shade over the left eye which makes all the difference."

"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."

"‘Stinko, is he?’ 'Not perhaps stinko, but certainly effervescent.’"

"'I hate you, I hate you!' cried Madeline, a thing I didn't know anyone ever said except in the second act of a musical comedy."

"...as I felt my way along the wall I collided with what turned out to be a grandfather clock, for the existence of which I had not budgeted, and it toppled over with a sound like the delivery of several tons of coal through the roof of a conservatory. Glass crashed, pulleys and things parted from their moorings, and as I stood trying to separate my heart from the front teeth in which it had become entangled, the lights flashed on and I beheld Sir Watkyn Bassett."

"I was expecting Pop Bassett to give an impersonation of a bomb falling on an ammunition dump, but he didn’t. Instead, he continued to exhibit that sort of chilly stiffness which you see in magistrates when they’re fining people five quid for boyish peccadilloes."

"‘And shove him into a dungeon with dripping walls and see to it that he is well gnawed by rats.’"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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..."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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!."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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)."

"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."

"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."

"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."