P.G. Wodehouse

“He looked like a vulture dissatisfied with its breakfast corpse.”

“But, Bill, old scout, your sister says there's a most corking links near here."He turned and stared at me, and nearly ran us into the bank."You don't mean honestly she said that?""She said you said it was better than St. Andrews.""So I did. Was that all she said I said?""Well, wasn't it enough?""She didn't happen to mention that I added the words, 'I don't think'?""No, she forgot to tell me that.""It's the worst course in Great Britain.”

“The first thing to do,' said Psmith, 'is to ascertain that such a place as Clapham Common really exists. One has heard of it, of course, but has its existence ever been proved? I think not.”

“Aunt Agatha's demeanor now was rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.”

“The drowsy stillness of the summer afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.”

“This woman always made Freddie feel as if he were being disemboweled by some clumsy amateur.”

“No wonder Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoi'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 reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”

“To persons of spirit like ourselves the only happy marriage is that which is based on a firm foundation of almost incessant quarrelling.”

“One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.”

“He sat looking at it with his eyes protruding in the manner popularized by snails, looking like something stuffed by a taxidermist who had learned his job from a correspondence course and had only got as far as lesson three.”

“I'm much too much the popular pet ever since I sang 'Every Nice Girl Loves A Sailor' at the village concert last year. I had them rolling in the aisles. Three encores, and so many bows that I got a crick in the back.""Spare me the tale of your excesses," I said distantly."I wore a sailor suit.""Please," I said, revolted.”

“No, I am quite content with you, Bertie. By the way, I do dislike that name Bertie. I think I shall call you Harold. Yes, I am perfectly satisfied with you. You have many faults, of course. I shall be pointing some of them out when I am at leisure.”

“I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.”

“She gave the impression of smiling with difficulty, possibly for fear of getting wrinkles.”

“One of the advantages a sister has when arguing with a brother is that she is under no obligation to be tactful. If she wishes to tell him that he is an idiot and ought to have his head examined, she can do so and, going further, can add that it is a thousand pities that no-one ever thought of smothering him with a pillow in his formative years.”

“I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well." ~ Bertram "Bertie" Wooster”

“Love, Miss Halliday, is a delicate plant. It needs tending, nurturing, assiduous fostering. This cannot be done by throwing the breakfast bacon at a husband's head.”

“We must always remember, however,' said Psmith gravely, 'that poets are also God's creatures.”

“On the occasions when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps...”

“I had one of those ideas I do sometimes get, though admittedly a chump of the premier class.”

“It's brain," I said; "pure brain! What do you do to get like that, Jeeves? I believe you must eat a lot of fish, or something. Do you eat a lot of fish, Jeeves?""No, sir.""Oh, well, then, it's just a gift, I take it; and if you aren't born that way there's no use worrying.”

“And so the merry party began. It was one of those jolly, happy, bread-crumbling parties where you cough twice before you speak, and then decide not to say it after all.”

“It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time.”

“Come on," he said. "Bring the poker."I brought the tongs as well. I felt like it.”

“The funny thing was that he wasn't altogether a fool in other ways. Deep down in him there was a kind of stratum of sense. I had known him, once or twice, show an almost human intelligence. But to reach that stratum, mind you, you needed dynamite.”

“Stimulated by the juice, I believe, men have even been known to ride alligators.”

“Well, why do you want a political career? Have you ever been in the House of Commons and taken a good square look at the inmates? As weird a gaggle of freaks and sub-humans as was ever collected in one spot.”

“As Shakespeare says, if you're going to do a thing you might as well pop right at it and get it over.”

“You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower.”

“Jeeves, I'm engaged.""I hope you will be very happy, sir.""Don't be an ass. I'm engaged to Miss Bassett.”

“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.”

“I have never written a novel yet...without doing 40,000 words or more and finding they were all wrong and going back and starting again, and this after filling 400 words with notes, mostly delirious, before getting into anything in the nature of a coherent scenario.”

“But those who read thrillers are an impatient race. They chafe at scenic rhapsodies and want to get on to the rough stuff.”

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

“Normally he was fond of most things. He was a good-natured and cheerful young man, who liked life and the great majority of those who lived it contemporaneously with himself. He had no enemies and many friends.But today he had noticed from the moment he had got out of bed that something was amiss with the world. Either he was in the grip of some divine discontent due to the highly developed condition of his soul, or else he had a grouch. One of the two.”

“The spine, and I do not attempt to conceal the fact, had become soluble, in the last degree.”

“I paused, partly for breath, and partly because I felt I had said enough. I stood there, waiting for her reply, wishing I had a throat lozenge to suck.”

“Lord Chesterfield said that since he had had the full use of his reason nobody had heard him laugh. I don't suppose you have read Lord Chesterfield's 'Letters To His Son'?...Well, of course I hadn't. Bertram Wooster does not read other people's letters. If I were employed in the post office I wouldn't even read the postcards.”

“I've found, as a general rule of life, that the things you think are going to be the scaliest nearly always turn out not so bad after all.”

“Sober or blotto, this is your motto: keep muddling through.”

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

“This is the age of the specialist, and years ago Rollo had settled on his career. Even as a boy, hardly capable of connected thought, he had been convinced that his speciality, the one thing he could do really well, was to inherit money.”

“I sank into a chair and mopped the frontal bone. Not for many a long day had I been in such a doodah”

“Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum.”

“I did pick up a few tolerably ripe and breezy expressions out in France. All through my military career there was something about me - some subtle magnetism, don't you know, and that sort of thing - that seemed to make Colonels and blighters of that sort rather inventive. I sort of inspired them, don't you know.”

“An apple a day, if well aimed, keeps the doctor away.”

“Mr Wisdom,' said the girl who had led him into the presence.'Ah,' said Howard Saxby, and there was a pause of perhaps three minutes, during which his needles clicked busily. 'Wisdom, did she say?''Yes. I wrote "Cocktail Time"''You couldn't have done better,' said Mr Saxby cordially. 'How's your wife, Mr Wisdom?'Cosmo said he had no wife.'Surely?'"I'm a bachelor.'Then Wordsworth was wrong. He said you were married to immortal verse. Excuse me a moment,' murmured Mr Saxby, applying himself to the sock again. 'I'm just turning the heel. Do you knit?''No.''Sleep does. It knits the ravelled sleave of care.'(After a period of engrossed knitting, Cosmo coughs loudly to draw attention to his presence.)'Goodness, you made me jump!' he (Saxby) said. 'Who are you?''My name, as I have already told you, is Wisdom''How did you get in?' asked Mr Saxby with a show of interest.'I was shown in.''And stayed in. I see, Tennyson was right. Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers. Take a chair.''I have.''Take another,' said Mr Saxby hospitably.”

“What you want, my lad, and what you're going to get are two verydifferent things.”

“Too often on such occasions one feels, as I feel so strongly with regard to poor old Stilton, that the kindly thing to do would be to seize the prospective bridegroom's trousers in one's teeth and draw him back from danger, as faithful dogs do to their masters on the edge of precipices on dark nights.”

“As I stood in my lonely bedroom at the hotel, trying to tie my white tie myself, it struck me for the first time that there must be whole squads of chappies in the world who had to get along without a man to look after them. I'd always thought of Jeeves as a kind of natural phenomenon; but, by Jove! of course, when you come to think of it, there must be quite a lot of fellows who have to press their own clothes themselves and haven't got anybody to bring them tea in the morning, and so on. It was rather a solemn thought, don't you know. I mean to say, ever since then I've been able to appreciate the frightful privations the poor have to stick.”