P. G. Wodehouse

Confidence, of course is an admirable asset to a golfer, but it should be an unspoken confidence. It is perilous to put it into speech. The gods of golf lie in wait to chasten the presumptious.

Golf acts as a corrective against sinful pride. I attribute the insane arrogance of the later Roman Emperors almost entirely to the fact that, never having played golf, they never knew that strange chastening humility which is engendered by a topped chip shot. If Cleopatra had been ousted in the first round of the Ladies' Singles, we should have heard a lot less of her proud imperiousness.

Judges, as a class, display, in the matter of arranging alimony, that reckless generosity which is found only in men who are giving away someone else's cash.

I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.

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.

She could not have gazed at him with a more rapturous intensity if she had been a small child and he a saucer of ice cream.

He was a long, stripy policeman, who flowed out of his uniform at odd spots, as if Nature, setting out to make a constable, had had a good deal of material left over which she had not liked to throw away but hardly seemed able to fit into the general scheme.

It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

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.

A man who has spent most of his adult life trying out a series of patent medicines is always an optimist.

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

I remember her telling me once that rabbits were the gnomes in attendance to the Fairy Queen and that the stars were God's daisy chain. Perfect rot, of course.

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.

Some time ago," he said, "--how long it seems! -- I remember saying to a young friend of mine of the name of Spiller, 'Comrade Spiller, never confuse the unusual with the impossible.' It is my guiding rule in life.

Oh, Jeeves,' I said; 'about that check suit.' Yes, sir?' Is it really a frost?' A trifle too bizarre, sir, in my opinion.' But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.' Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.' He's supposed to be one of the best men in London.' I am saying nothing against his moral character, sir.

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.

Comedy is the kindly contemplation of the incongruous.

And, anyway, no matter how much you may behave like the deaf adder of Scripture which, as you are doubtless aware, the more one piped, the less it danced, or words to that effect, I shall carry on as planned.

I go in for what is known in the trade as 'light writing' and those who do that - humorists they are sometimes called - are looked down upon by the intelligentsia and sneered at.

Cats, as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by the fact that in ancient Egypt they were worshipped as gods. This makes them prone to set themselves up as critics and censors of the frail and erring human beings whose lot they share.