Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (October 15, 1881 – February 14, 1975) was an English humorist whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics and numerous pieces of journalism. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years, and his many writings continue to be widely read. 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 a pre– and post–World War I English upper class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
-----
A girl who bonnets a policeman with an ashcan full of bottles is obviously good wife-and-mother timber.
A man who has spent most of his adult life trying out a series of patent medicines is always an optimist.
At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.
Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.
Chumps always make the best husbands... All the unhappy marriages come from the husbands having brains.
Dedication: To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.
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 books.
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.
He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.
He groaned slightly and winced like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch.
He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.
He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.
He was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say when.
He was white and shaken, like a dry martini.
I always advise people never to give advice.
I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
I'd always thought her half-baked, but now I think they didn't even put her in the oven.
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.
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.
It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.
It is true of course, that I have a will of iron, but it can be switched off if the circumstances seem to demand it.
It was one of those parties where you cough twice before you speak, and then decide not to say it after all.
Love has had a lot of press-agenting from the oldest times; but there are higher, nobler things than love.
Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase.
Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.
Mere abuse is no criticism.
Never put anything on paper, my boy, and never trust a man with a small black moustache.
One of the drawbacks to life is that it contains moments when one is compelled to tell the truth.
Red hair, sir, in my opinion, is dangerous.
She had more curves than a scenic railway.
Slice him where you like, a hellhound is always a hellhound.
Some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant- better left unstirred.
The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.
The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.
There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.
There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.
To my daughter Leonora without whose never failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been completed in half the time.
Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.
Whatever may be said in favor of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.
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.
When you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.
Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum.
You can't go by what a girl says, when she's giving you hell for making a chump of yourself. It's like Shakespeare. Sounds well but doesn't mean anything.
-----
(October 15 is also the birthday of Friedrich Nietzsche/)
Categories: P.G. Wodehouse, Quotes of the day
KGB Stuff Commentwear E-Mail KGB
Donate via PayPal
