Top 500 P. G. Wodehouse Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “It was one of the most disgusting spectacles I’ve ever seen – this white-haired old man, who should have been thinking of the hereafter, standing there lying like an actor.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

202. “Fascination exists only in the imagination of the fascinated.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

203. “But then, at meals, my attention is pretty well riveted on the foodstuffs.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

204. “He coughed again, that deferential cough of his which sounds like a well-bred sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain-top.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

205. “He was either a man of about a hundred and fifty who was rather young for his years, or a man of about a hundred and ten who had been aged by trouble.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

206. “Deep down in his heart the genuine Englishman has a rugged distaste for seeing his country invaded by a foreign army. People were asking themselves by what right these aliens had overrun British soil. An ever-growing feeling of annoyance had begun to lay hold of the nation.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

207. “That’s always the way in this world. The chappies you’d like to lend money to won’t let you, whereas the chappies you don’t want to lend it to will do everything except actually stand you on your head and lift the specie out of your pockets.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

208. “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.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

209. “Just then the kid upset the milk over Freddie’s trousers, and when he had come back after changing his clothes he began to talk about what a much-maligned man King Herod was.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

210. “It was one of those jolly, peaceful mornings that make a chappie wish he’d got a soul or something.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

211. “She’s a sort of human vampire-bat.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

212. “There’s no doubt about it, being a policeman warps a man’s mind and ruins that sunny faith in his fellow human beings which is the foundation of a lovable character. There seems to be no way of avoiding this.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

213. “I was exercised about the poor fish, as I am about all my pals, close or distant, who find themselves treading upon Life’s banana skins.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

214. “Boko looked at me, and raised his eyebrows. I looked at Boko, and raised my eyebrows. Nobby looked at us both, and raised her eyebrows. Then we looked at Stilton, and all raised our eyebrows. It was one of those big eyebrow-raising mornings.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

215. “I hope that this will be a lesson to you not to go to fancy-dress balls as a lizard. If fewer people went about the place pretending to be lizards, this would be a better and sweeter world.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

216. “To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

217. “Marriage isn’t a motion-picture close-up with slow fade-out on the embrace. It’s a partnership, and what’s the good of a partnership if your heart’s not in it? It’s like collaborating with a man you dislike...”

— P. G. Wodehouse

218. “I wish people wouldn’t tell me I can’t do things.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

219. “Well, you know what the Fulham Road’s like. If your top-hat blows off into it, it has about as much chance as a rabbit at a dogshow.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

220. “England is a jolly sight too small for anyone to live in with Aunt Agatha, if she’s really on the warpath.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

221. “Would you say my head was like a pumpkin, Wooster?’ ‘Not a bit, old man.’ ‘Not like a pumpkin?’ ‘No, not like a pumpkin. A touch of the dome of St Paul’s, perhaps.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

222. “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.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

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

— P. G. Wodehouse

224. “Lady Kimbuck’s eyes gleamed. She took the package eagerly. She never lost an opportunity of reading compromising letters. She enjoyed them as literature, and there was never any knowing when they might come in useful.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

225. “More and more clearly as the scones disappeared into his interior he saw that what the sensible man wanted was a wife and a home with scones like these always at his diposal.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

226. “She was one of those women who kind of numb a fellow’s faculties. She made me feel as if I were ten years old and had been brought into the drawing-room in my Sunday clothes to say how-d’you-do.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

227. “And he was, one could see, at peace with all the world. His daily round of tasks may or may not have been completed, but he was obviously off duty for the moment, and his whole attitude was that of a policeman with nothing on his mind but his helmet.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

228. “It ought to be a criminal offence for women to dye their hair. Especially red. What the devil do women do that sort of thing for?”

— P. G. Wodehouse

229. “Lord Emsworth could conceive of no way in which Freddie could be of value to a dog-biscuit firm, except possibly as a taster.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

230. “Statisticians estimate that crime among good golfers is lower than in any class of the community except possibly bishops.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

231. “If you could call the thing a horse. If it hadn’t shown a flash of speed in the straight, it would have got mixed up with the next race.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

232. “A pictorial record of his hopes and despairs would have looked like a fever chart.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

233. “In fact, it seemed to him that he could almost hear the wedding bells ringing already. Then, coming out of his dreams, he realized that it was the telephone.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

234. “When you are discovered by a householder – with revolver – in his parlor at half-past three in the morning, it is surely an injudicious move to lay stress on your proficiency as a burglar. The householder may be supposed to take that for granted.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

235. “For years Belpher oysters had been the mainstay of gay supper parties at the Savoy, the Carlton and Romano’s. Dukes doted on them; chorus girls wept if they were not on the bill of fare. And then, in an evil hour, somebody discovered that what made the Belpher oyster so particularly plump and succulent was the fact that it breakfasted, launched and dined almost entirely on the local sewage. There is but a thin line ever between popular homage and execration.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

236. “I wonder what Tommy Morris would have had to say to all this number 6-iron, number 12-iron, number 28-iron stuff. He probably wouldn’t have said anything, just made one of those strange Scottish noises at the back of his throat like someone gargling.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

237. “It was all Mrs. Waddington could do to refrain from hurling a bust of Edgar Allan Poe at her head.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

238. “That is all, Augustus,′ she said, and dismissed me with a gesture of loathing, as if I had been a green-fly that had fallen short of even the very moderate level of decency of the average run-of-the-mill green fly.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

239. “Lady Blunt had come up, flushed and triumphant, having left the solitary porter a demoralized wreck.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

240. “I see no percentage in your being alive. I wish you were a corpse, preferably a mangled one. I should like to dance on your remains.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

241. “Of course I think so. Have you forgotten what I told you the other day?’ ‘Yes,’ said Lord Emsworth. He always forgot what people told him the other day.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

242. “He looked, as always, as if he had been carved from some durable form of wood by someone who was taking a correspondence course in sculpture and had just reached his third lesson.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

243. “Wait till you see her. Sort of woman who makes you feel that your hands are the color of a frightful tomato and the size of a billiard table, if you know what I mean.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

244. “He had reached that condition of mind which the old Vikings used to call Berserk and which among modern Malays is termed running amok.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

245. “I was endeavouring to adjust the faculties, which were in urgent need of a bit of first-aid treatment.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

246. “Furthermore, as is the case with so many of the younger literati, he dresses like a tramp cyclist, affecting turtleneck sweaters and grey flannel bags with a patch on the knee and conveying a sort of general suggestion of having been left out in the rain overnight in an ash can.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

247. “He had that indefinable air which comes to young men who have had to make their way up from a ten-dollar start.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

248. “The water as a topic of conversation dried up.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

249. “Aunt Agatha is like an elephant- not so much to look at, for in appearance she resembles more a well-bred vulture, but because she never forgets.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

250. “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.”

— P. G. Wodehouse