P.G. Wodehouse

Quotes

1. 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.

2. 

   [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."

3. 

   ... 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."

4. 

   "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."

5. 

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

6. 

   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.

7. 

   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.

8. 

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

9. 

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

10. 

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

11. 

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

12. 

    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.