Top 500 P. G. Wodehouse Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “One uses the verb ‘descend’ advisedly, for what is required is some word suggesting instantaneous activity. About Baxter’s progress from the second floor to the first there was nothing halting or hesitating. He, so to speak, did it now. Planting.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

202. “It looked something like a pen wiper and something like a piece of hearth-rug. A second and keener inspection revealed it as a Pekinese puppy.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

203. “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

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

— P. G. Wodehouse

205. “If you haven’t realised by this time that I love you, and always shall love you, and have never loved anybody else, and never shall love anybody else, you’re a fathead.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

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

— P. G. Wodehouse

207. “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

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

— P. G. Wodehouse

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

— P. G. Wodehouse

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

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

— P. G. Wodehouse

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

— P. G. Wodehouse

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

— P. G. Wodehouse

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

— P. G. Wodehouse

236. “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

237. “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

238. “We do not tell old friends beneath our roof-tree that they are an offence to the eyesight.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

239. “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

240. “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

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

— P. G. Wodehouse

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

— P. G. Wodehouse

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “He couldn’t have moved quicker if he had been the dachshund Poppet, who at this juncture was running round in circles, trying, if I read his thoughts aright, to work off the rather heavy lunch he had had earlier in the afternoon.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

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

— P. G. Wodehouse