“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.”

“It can't be done, old thing. Sorry, but it's out of the question. I couldn't go through all that again.""Not for me?""Not for a dozen more like you.""I never thought," said Bingo sorrowfully, "to hear those words from Bertie Wooster!""Well, you've heard them now," I said. "Paste them in your hat.""Bertie, we were at school together.""It wasn't my fault.""We've been pals for fifteen years.""I know. It's going to take me the rest of my life to live it down.”

“The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, "This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but if I'm such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay," you're sunk. If they aren't in interesting situations, characters can't be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them."(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)”

“I say, Bertie," he said, after a pause of about an hour and a quarter."Hallo!""Do you like the name Mabel?""No.""No?""No.""You don't think there's a kind of music in the word, like the wind rustling gently through the tree-tops?""No."He seemed disappointed for a moment; then cheered up."Of course, you wouldn't. You always were a fat-headed worm without any soul, weren't you?""Just as you say. Who is she? Tell me all.”

“[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start."(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)”

“Young Bingo was too busy introducing the mob to take much notice. They were a very C3 collection. Comrade Butt looked like one of those things that come out of dead trees after the rain; moth-eaten was the word I should have used to described old Rowbotham; and as for Charlotte, she seemed to take me straight into another and a dreadful world.”

“Tea, pa!" said Charlotte, starting at the word like the old war-horse who hears the bugle; and we got down to it.”