P. G. Wodehouse

“The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.”

“He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.”

“I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”

“A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.”

“What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?”

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

“...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.”

“The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.”

“Sudden success in golf is like the sudden acquisition of wealth. It is apt to unsettle and deteriorate the character.”

“-'What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?' There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter”

“Golf... is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well.”

“Flowers are happy things.”

“He was white and shaken, like a dry martini.”

“The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.”

“Golf, like measles, should be caught young.”

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

“I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”

“She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.”

“Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.”

“Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.”

“There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.”

“Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum.”

“To find a man's true character, play golf with him.”

“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.”

“If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.”

“I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.”

“You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”

“It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.”

“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.”

“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”

“The Problem of Life seemed to him to be solved. He looked on down the years, and he could see no troubles there of any kind whatsoever. Reason suggested that there were probably one or two knocking about somewhere, but this was no time to think of them. He examined the future, and found it good.”

“When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff.”

“This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.”

“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.”

“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”

“As a rule, from what I've observed, the American Captain of Industry doesn't do anything out of business hours. When he has put the cat out and locked up the office for the night, he just relapses into a state of coma from which he emerges only to start being a Captain of Industry again.”

“Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.”

“He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”

“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”

“I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”

“Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.”

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

“In a series of events, all of which had been a bit thick, this, in his opinion, achieved the maximum of thickness.”

“Whenever I get that sad, depressed feeling, I go out and kill a policeman.”

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

“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.”

“From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.”

“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.”

“How anybody can compose a story by word of mouth face to face with a bored-looking secretary with a notebook is more than I can imagine. Yet many authors think nothing of saying, 'Ready, Miss Spelvin? Take dictation. Quote no comma Sir Jasper Murgatroyd comma close quotes comma said no better make i...”

“I wonder if you have noticed a rather rummy thing about it -- viz. that it is everywhere. You can't get away from it. Love, I mean. Wherever you go, there it is, buzzing along in every class of life. Quite remarkable.”

“There is, of course, this to be said for the Omnibus Book in general and this one in particular. When you buy it, you have got something. The bulk of this volume makes it almost the ideal paper-weight. The number of its pages assures its posessor of plenty of shaving paper on his vacation. Place upo...”

“Few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.”

“He was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'when!'”

“Red hair, sir, in my opinion, is dangerous.”

“I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”