Sunday, March 31, 2019

I never got on too well with Wodehouse

(from 2011)

I never got on too well with Wodehouse as author, apart from the Mr. Mulliner short stories, but he did have a nice line in one-liners.

Here are a few:

On romance

As a child of eight he had once kissed a girl of six under the mistletoe at a Christmas party, but there his sex life had come to an abrupt halt.

On children

Like so many infants of tender years, he presented to the eye the aspect of a mass murderer suffering from an ingrowing toenail.

On sound

She was giving the impression of a hyena which had just heard a good one from another hyena.

Somewhere in the woods beyond the river a nightingale had begun to sing with all the full-throated zest of a bird conscious of having had a rave notice from the poet Keats.

On writing

I dedicate this book to my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement it would have been finished in half the time.

On appearance

Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.

My dear, you look like Helen of Troy after a good facial.

The French invented the only known cure for dandruff. It is called the guillotine.

Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.

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

And finally on Life...

A melancholy looking man, he had the appearance of one who had searched for the leak in life’s gas pipe with a lighted candle.

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