"If you're 50 years old or younger, give every book about 50 pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up.

If you're over 50, which is when time gets shorter, subtract your age from 100 - the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding whether or not to quit. If you're 100 or over you get to judge the book by its cover, despite the dangers in doing so."
— Nancy Pearl

"I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. "
— Joss Whedon

""Passion. It lies in all of us. Sleeping ... waiting ... and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir ... open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us ... guides us. Passion rules us all. And we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love ... the clarity of hatred ... the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank. Without passion, we'd be truly dead." "
— Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."
— George Bernard Shaw

"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Once there was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time is called the Dark Ages."
— George Bernard Shaw

"You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live."
— George Bernard Shaw

"The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself."
— George Bernard Shaw

"When the horrors of anarchy force us to set up laws that forbid us to fight and torture one another for sport, we still snatch at every excuse for declaring individuals outside the protection of law and torturing them to our hearts content."
— George Bernard Shaw

"The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners,
but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another."
— George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion and My Fair Lady)

"The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching."
— George Bernard Shaw

"The voice of Love seemed to call me, but it was a wrong number."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"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. "
— P.G. Wodehouse

"It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say "when". "
— P.G. Wodehouse

"I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"...it has been well said that it is precisely these moments when we are feeling that ours is the world and everything that's in it that Fate selects for sneaking up on us with the rock in the stocking."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty."
— P. G. Wodehouse

"Mike nodded. A sombre nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812 and said, "So, you're back from Moscow, eh?"
— P. G. Wodehouse

"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. "
— P.G. Wodehouse

"I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"I suppose he must have taken about a nine or something in hats. Shows what a rotten thing it is to let your brain develop too much."
— P.G. Wodehouse (The Inimitable Jeeves)

"Everything in life that’s any fun, as somebody wisely observed, is either immoral, illegal or fattening."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Warm-hearted! I should think he has to wear asbestos vests!"
— P.G. Wodehouse (The Inimitable Jeeves)

"Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his head first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Doctor Sally)

"I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest of suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Right Ho, Jeeves)

"As for Gussie Finknottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Employers are like horses—they require management."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Carry On, Jeeves)

"Every author really wants to have letters printed in the paper. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"What I'm worrying about is what Tom is going to say when he starts talking."

"Uncle Tom?"

"I wish there was something else you could call him except 'Uncle Tom,' " Aunt Dahlia said a little testily. "Every time you do it, I expect to see him turn black and start playing the banjo."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me.
But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind."
— Stephen Fry

"There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'"

"The mood will pass, sir."
— P.G. Wodehouse (The Code of the Woosters)

"Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"-'What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?'
'There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter'"
— P.G. Wodehouse

"It is true of course, that I have a will of iron, but it can be switched off if the circumstances seem to demand it."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Jeeves in the Morning)

"In your walks about London you will sometimes see bent, haggard figures that look as if they had recently been caught in some powerful machinery. They are those fellows who got mixed up with Catsmeat when he was meaning well."
— P.G. Wodehouse (The Mating Season)

"...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"When you're alone you don't do much laughing."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"I read the paragraph again. A peculiar feeling it gave me. I don't know if you have ever experienced the sensation of seeing the announcement of the engagement of a pal of yours to a girl whom you were only saved from marrying yourself by the skin of your teeth. It induces a sort of -- well, it's difficult to describe it exactly; but I should imagine a fellow would feel much the same if he happened to be strolling through the jungle with a boyhood chum and met a tigress or a jaguar, or what not, and managed to shin up a tree and looked down and saw the friend of his youth vanishing into the undergrowth in the animal's slavering jaws. A sort of profound, prayerful relief, if you know what I mean, blended at the same time with a pang of pity. What I'm driving at is that, thankful as I was that I hadn't had to marry Honoria myself, I was sorry to see a real good chap like old Biffy copping it. I sucked down a spot of tea and began brooding over the business."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Other men puffed, snorted, and splashed. George passed through the ocean with the silent dignity of a torpedo. Other men swallowed water, here a mouthful, there a pint, anon, maybe, a quart or so, and returned to the shore like foundering derelicts. George's mouth had all the exclusiveness of a fashionable club. His breast stroke was a thing to see and wonder at. When he did the crawl, strong men gasped. When he swam on his back, you felt that that was the only possible method of progression."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"The ideas of debtor and creditor as to what constitutes a good time never coincide."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Love Among the Chickens)

"She had more curves than a scenic railway"
— P.G. Wodehouse

"It was my Uncle George who discovered alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Love is a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her friends lice."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit)

""Very good," I said coldly. "In that case, tinkerty-tonk." And I meant it to sting."
— PG Wodehouse