Top 312 Quotes & Sayings by P. G. Wodehouse

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

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.

It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

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.

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

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

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

Golf, like measles, should be caught young.

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

Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.

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

He was white and shaken, like a dry martini.

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

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.

Flowers are happy things.

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

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

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.

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.

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.

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

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.

Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.

I attribute my whole success in life to a rigid observance of the fundamental rule - Never have yourself tattooed with any woman's name, not even her initials.

Some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant—better left unstirred.

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

Everything in life that’s any fun, as somebody wisely observed, is either immoral, illegal or fattening.

Always 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.

Alcohol is a misunderstood vitamin.

She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say 'when.'

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

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.

As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.

It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.

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

One of the drawbacks to life is that it contains moments when one is compelled to tell the truth.

If men's minds were like dominoes, surely his would be the double blank.

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.

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

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.

There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'" "The mood will pass, sir.

A certain critic -- for such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.

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.

You're one of those guys who can make a party just by leaving it. It's a great gift.

It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.

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

I always advise people never to give advice.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Rugby football is a game I can't claim absolutely to understand in all its niceties, if you know what I mean. I can follow the broad, general principles, of course. I mean to say, I know that the main scheme is to work the ball down the field somehow and deposit it over the line at the other end and that, in order to squalch this programme, each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellow man which, if done elsewhere, would result in 14 days without the option, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench.

I always strive, when I can, to spread sweetness and light. There have been several complaints about it.

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.

Oh, I don't know, you know, don't you know?