P. G. Wodehouse
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.
An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.
Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).
“I clutched at the brow. The mice in my interior had now got up an informal dance and were buck-and-winging all over the place like a bunch of Nijinskys.”
“Musical comedy is the Irish stew of drama. Anything may be put into it, with the certainty that it will improve the general effect.”
“-'What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?'There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter”
“Some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant—better left unstirred.”
“I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.”
“I tried to utter, but could not. The tongue had got all tangled up with the uvula, and the brain seemed paralyzed. I was feeling the same stunned feeling which, I imagine, Chichester Clam must have felt as the door of the potting shed slammed and he heard Boko starting to yodel without -- a nightmare sensation of being but a helpless pawn in the hands of Fate.”
“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.”
“Woman is the unfathomable, incalculable mystery, the problem that we men can never hope to solve.”
“I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism.”
“When it comes to letting the world in on the secrets of his heart, he has about as much shrinking reticence as a steam calliope.”
“Cheer up, Crips, and keep smiling. That’s the thing to do. If you go through life with a smile on your face, you’ll be amazed how many people will come up to you and say ‘What the hell are you grinning about? What’s so funny?’ Make you a lot of new friends.”
“It's and odd thing, but however much an oficionado one may be of mysteries in book form, when they pop up in real life they seldom fail to give one the pip.”
“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.”
“I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”
“Oh, Jeeves,' I said; 'about that check suit.'Yes, sir?'Is it really a frost?'A trifle too bizarre, sir, in my opinion.'But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.'Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.'He's supposed to be one of the best men in London.'I am saying nothing against his moral character, sir.”
“Well, you certainly are the most wonderfully woolly baa-lamb that ever stepped.”