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"On writing Jeeves and Wooster stories:You tell yourself that you can take Jeeves stories or leave them alone, that one more can't possibly hurt you, because you know you can pull up whenever you feel like it, but it is merely wish-full thinking. The craving has gripped you and there is no resisting it.You have passed the point of no return."
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"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done."
"Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing."
"Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do- to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street."
"T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others."
"I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months. Any longer and - for me, at least - the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity."
"Some people write letters, in the library."
"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."
Explore more quotes by P. G. Wodehouse
"The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun."
"A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour."
"This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers."
"I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it."
"You can't go by what a girl says, when she's giving you the devil for making a chump of yourself. It's like Shakespeare. Sounds well, but doesn't mean anything."
"And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need."
"Water!' cried Marie.'Vinegar!' recommended the bell-boy.'Eu-de-Cologne!' said Bill.'Pepper!' said Lord Tidmouth.Mary had another suggestion.'Give her air!'So had the bell-boy.'Slap her hands!'Lord Tidmouth went further.'Sit on her head!' he advised."
"If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine."
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