Humorists

"Anybody can talk me round. If I were in a Trappist monastery, the first thing that would happen would be that some smooth performer would lure me into some frightful idiocy against my better judgment by means of the deaf-and-dumb language."

"I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast."

"Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad."

"I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back."

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

"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."

"“...These trousers may sit well, but, if they do, it is because the pockets are empty.”"

"I like to be surrounded by joy and life, and I know nothing more joyless and deader than a dead fish. Multiply that dead fish by a million, and you have an environment which only a Dante could contemplate with equanimity."

"When I was but a babe, my eldest sister was bribed with sixpence an hour by my nurse to keep an eye on me and see that I did not raise Cain. At the end of the first day she struck for a shilling, and got it."

"[Millionaire-financier Vincent Jopp said:] "Go out and buy me a set of clubs, a red jacket, a cloth cap, a pair of spiked shoes, and a ball." --"One ball?" "Certainly. What need is there of more?" --"It sometimes happens," I explained, "that a player who is learning the game fails to hit the ball straight, and then he often loses it in the rough at the side of the fairway." "Absurd!" said Vincent Jopp. "If I set out to drive my ball straight, I shall drive it straight.""

"What I want to know is what a fellow does when he plays golf. Tell me in as few words as you can just what it's all about." --"You hit a ball with a stick until it falls into a hole."

"... Vladimir Brusiloff proceeded to sum up. "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.""

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

"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."

"Love has had a lot of press-agenting from the oldest times; but there are higher, nobler things than love."

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

"It was a cold, disapproving gaze, such as a fastidious luncher who was not fond of caterpillars might have directed at one which he had discovered in his portion of salad..."

"It was one of those cold, clammy, accusing sort of eyes--the kind that makes you reach up to see if your tie is straight: and he looked at me as I were some sort of unnecessary product which Cuthbert the Cat had brought in after a ramble among the local ash-cans."

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

"Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good."

"Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious."

"At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies."

"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."

"The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun."

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

"He wore the unmistakable look of a man about to be present at a row between women, and only a wet cat in a strange backyard bears itself with less jauntiness than a man faced by such a prospect."

"There are some things a chappie's mind absolutely refuses to picture, and Aunt Julia singing 'Rumpty-tiddley-umpty-ay' is one of them."

"Henry glanced hastily at the mirror. Yes, he did look rather old. He must have overdone some of the lines on his forehead. He looked something between a youngish centenarian and a nonagenarian who had seen a good deal of trouble."

"‘As a sleuth you are poor. You couldn’t detect a bass-drum in a telephone-booth.’"

"At five minutes to eleven on the morning named he was at the station, a false beard and spectacles shielding his identity from the public eye. If you had asked him he would have said that he was a Scotch business man. As a matter of fact, he looked far more like a motor-car coming through a haystack."

"In English country towns, if the public houses do not actually outnumber the inhabitants, they all do an excellent trade. It is only when they are two to one that hard times hit them and set the innkeepers to blaming the government."

"The village of Market Blandings is one of those sleepy hamlets which modern progress has failed to touch... The church is Norman, and the intelligence of the majority of the natives palaeozoic."

"His was a life which lacked, perhaps, the sublimer emotions which raised Man to the level of the gods, but it was undeniably an extremely happy one. He never experienced the thrill of ambition fulfilled, but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of ambition frustrated. His name, when he died, would not live for ever in England's annals; he was spared the pain of worrying about this by the fact that he had no desire to live for ever in England's annals. He was possibly as nearly contented a human being can be in this century of alarms and excursions."

"So was victory turned into defeat, and Billy's jaw became squarer and his eye more full of the light of battle than ever."

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

""Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary," murmured Psmith. (Earlier usage of the precise words "Elementary, my dear Watson" has been found in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.)"

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.' (quoting John Greenleaf Whittier)"

"It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them."

"Routine is the death to heroism."

"Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died."

"Peter's most outstanding achievement was to be Peter Ustinov … and he was an all-round wonderful person. I'm very glad to have known him, I shall miss him greatly."

"He was one of the great story tellers of modern times. The biggest shame is that we have so few people left these days who really tell stories."

"Jack of all trades, master of none — but what a jack! … In the end he was a disappointed man … He wanted to be a great playwright or a great author. He never quite made that."

"He would always see the bright side of something, even something that would be very annoying to him or to all of us around him. He would get over it and he would always find that there was something positive to be gained from it. He was a giver, throughout everything, and a wonderful warm person."

"The day had to come when he'd be gone. Thank God it was a long time coming. But he's a big thing to do without."

"I think he'd just get bored doing one thing. He would go from one thing to another I think because to him it was all one. That's what I loved about him. He was a very lovable man. I hardly knew him, I only met him two or three times, but each time was ingrained in my memory like being like some superb intellectual circus."

"I quite like talking myself, but when Peter was in the room there wasn't much point, you just had to listen. He was unimaginably, overwhelmingly gifted. You had to imagine a cross between Dr Johnson, Isaiah Berlin, Peter Sellers and don't forget Charlie Chaplin — because Peter was a great mime too. … He was inexhaustible. It was like talking to Europe, talking to history."

"He was a man for all seasons, perhaps the true renaissance man."

"Sunshine Sally and Peter Ustinov don't like the scene anyhow. I dropped acid on a Saturday night just to see what the fuss was about."

"It was as if all the world's wit were rolled into one portly fellow. … He spoke six languages, and a few others of his own comic invention. With gifts too wide-ranging to be contained in one art form, he wrote hit plays (Romanoff and Juliet) and books of nonfiction and short stories. … His spirit was essentially impish (as on a comedy album for which he provided all the voices and sound effects); his greatest role was Peter Ustinov, inexhaustible raconteur. The title of his 1977 autobiography summed up the world's opinion of this engaging, capacious talent: Dear Me."