(Based on image of the Wodehouse wax figure at Dulwich College)

Quotes about Wodehouse

Try our Quotes-generator for smartphones - link top right
and see also: Plums - Wodehouse quotes

"Oh, hullo, Upjohn," I said. "Yoo-hoo!"
"Who you?" he responded, making it sound like a reverse echo.

Jeeves in the Offing - 1960

By Plummies

"Waugh, another chronicler of the English aristocracy, half a generation younger,
shares a lot of turf with Wodehouse, but he worked in a more melancholy vein.
Waugh observed the sunset of the English upper classes
For Wodehouse the sun was fixed eternally at noon."

Lev Grossman (2011)
In praise of Wodehouse

"You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour."

Stephen Fry (2000)

"People sometimes say to me, “Do you ever aspire to write a serious book?”
And my practiced glib answer to that is,
“No, my aspirations are much greater than that. I aspire to write like P.G. Wodehouse.”

Douglas Adams - Writing like P. G. Wodehouse

"What Wodehouse writes is pure word music. It matters not one whit that he writes endless variations
on a theme of pig kidnappings, lofty butlers, and ludicrous impostures. He is the greatest musician
of the English language, and exploring variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day."

Douglas Adams in his introduction to a modern edition of "Sunset at Blandings"

"Reading Wodehouse is a bit like eating potato chips – you can’t stop after just a few,
highly addictive when you begin to enjoy the process and once you are finished,
there is nothing substantive you can say about the experience except a sense of pure, silly satisfaction"

Christopher Hitchens

"In the flat landscape of the school story it is right to recognise P. G. Wodehouse's Mike and Psmith
as eminences, though only foothills in his own literary massif."

Arthur Calder Marshall (Evening Standard - 21.07.82)

“To P.G. Wodehouse, whose books and stories have brightened my life for many years.
Also, to show my pleasure in his having been kind enough to tell me that he enjoys my books”.

Agatha Christie - Dedication in her book "Hallowe'en Party"

"I like to take a Trollope to bed, but if one is not available, I will settle for a Wodehouse"

Rt.Hon. Harold MacMillan MP (Con.) Prime Minister & First Lord of the Treasury (1957-1963)

"Lord Peter paused, in the very act of ringing the bell. His jaw slackened, giving his long,
narrow face a faintly foolish and hesitant look, reminiscent of the heroes of Mr P. G. Wodehouse."

Dorothy Sayers - "Unnatural Death"

"It's no surprise that Plum, as Wodehouse is fondly known, adored crosswords - like his stories,
they consist of language pared down to an elegant minimum and assembled, jigsaw-like,
to a symmetric whole, all to no higher purpose than whiling away some time and raising a few smiles."

Alan Connor - "The Crossword Century" (Gotham Books, 2014)

"The strength of Wodehouse lies not in his almost incomprehensibly intricate plots
–Restoration comedy again – but in his prose style and there, above all, in his command of
mind-splitting metaphor.
To describe a girl as 'the sand in civilisation's spinach' enlarges and decorates the imagination."

VS Pritchett

"He is a most impractical boy… often forgetful, he finds difficulty in the most simple things
and asks absurd questions, whereas he can understand the most difficult things.
He has the most distorted ideas about wit and humour; he draws over his books in a most
distressing way, and writes foolish rhymes in other people’s books.
One is obliged to like him in spite of his vagaries."

Gilkes - Master of Dulwich College

"And Mr. Wodehouse, well, he was a conjuror, summoning a world that had never been
but was more real than any that had, a world that provided all that the so-called real world withheld
-- most especially, friends who didn't leave."

"Mr. Wodehouse, it turned out, was an entirely new experience. He was delicious, lighter than air.
Generous to a fault. He made her laugh as no man ever had. Surely, he wrote only for her.
His rhythms, the way his wit kissed a phrase and sent it dancing -- these armed her like summer.
She laughed aloud and fell in love again and again."

Nell Stillman - heroin in the book "Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse" (2015) by Faith Sullivan

"G.K. Chesterton died yesterday. P.G. Wodehouse is now the greatest living master of the English language."

T.H. White (15.06.36)

"P. G. Wodehouse remains the greatest chronicler of a certain kind of Englishness that no one else
has ever captured quite so sharply, or with quite as much wit and affection"

Julian Fellowes

“To dive into a Wodehouse novel is to swim in some of the most elegantly turned phrases
in the English language.”

Ben Schott

“I envy those who’ve never read Wodehouse before - the prospect of reams of unread Wodehouse
stretching out in front of you is . . . something which is enticing to contemplate.”

Tony Blair

“Wodehouse is the greatest comic writer ever.”

Douglas Adams

"the gold standard of English wit."

Christoper Hitchens

“Blandings is an entire world unto itself and, one senses, Wodehouse pours into it his deepest feelings
for England.”

Stephen Fry

"P. G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century."

Sebastian Faulks

“P.G. Wodehouse is still the funniest writer ever to have put words on paper.”

Hugh Laurie

“Sublime comic genius”

Ben Elton

"If you are tired of Blandings you are tired of the English language and of life."

Financial Times (1965) on the book "Galahad at Blandings"

Watch this page for future updates

"For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man; no "aboriginal calamity." His characters have never
tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden
from which we are all exiled.
... Mr Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity
that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in."

Evelyn Waugh (1961)

And that is the spirit in which the content of this page aspires to be presented.

To top of page