"My happiest days as a boy were spent near Bridgnorth. The only thing I didn't like in my formative, or Stableford period, was the social stuff. Owners of big estates round about would keep inviting me for the weekend."
The author of these two quotes went on to pen 92 comic novels, some 18 plays and 35 musicals and still holds the record for having the most shows (five) on Broadway running at any one time.
So who was this literary giant, and why are we in the Bridgnorth district not trumpeting this rich legacy from our battlements?
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, the creator of Jeeves and Wooster, was born in 1881, but it was not until he was 14 that his parents moved to "The Old House" at Stableford, which became his holiday home when released from Dulwich College.
That house, Hay's Bank, has recently been sold, having been for 60 years in the family of the late Judge Collis.
Stableford and the lands which surround it in a 15 or 20 mile radius were P.G.'s happy hunting ground and also the basis for an imaginary world at the centre of which stood Blandings Castle, the quintessential stately home of England.
Plum (short for Pelham) Woodhouse began writing about Blandings Castle in 1914 and died in 1975 at the age of 93 leaving behind the first draft of Sunset at Blandings.
But, even in 1914, that fateful year which turned English society upside down, Wodehouse was writing about a golden age of the landed gentry which was already becoming more a memory than a practised way of life.
He wrote of imperious butlers who headed a household staff running into dozens, of grounds with acres of lawns and flower beds and houses with more rooms than many a hotel, of estates that lay at the heart of the British Empire.
It all sounds a bit fanciful these days, but at one time it was true and no more so than in this little corner of Shropshire.
There was a typical concentration of country houses and stately homes in this area around Bridgnorth - a manor every two miles and many, though not all, have survived.
When those invitations came to P.G. and his piano-playing brother, Armine, they could have come from any one of around 20 stately homes within travelling distance.
Interviewed in the Observer in 1971, Wodehouse said: "Blandings was a sort of mixture of places I remembered."
So it could be many houses rolled into one - but this has not stopped Plum's admirers from trying to fix on one original.
Colonel Norman Murphy, whose book In Search of Blandings is one of the main inspirations for this article , comes down in favour of a mixture of Weston Park for its setting and Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire for its looks and 14th century history.
Other aficionados have focussed upon Apley Hall because of its battlements and its closeness to the River Severn and a tributary; a good case can also be made for Tong Castle, a gothic monstrosity demolished in the 1950s, which had the requisite castellations and a lake in the grounds.
(P.G. borrowed the lake from Corsham Court in Wiltshire near to the home of one of the formidable aunts he lodged with while at Dulwich).
Blandings should also be found at the head of a vale with the Wrekin visible in the background, a small settlement near its gates (Blandings Parva) and the larger town of Market Blandings with its hotels and railway connection to London some five miles away. Weston Park, with Weston-under-Lizard and Shifnal in its environs, chimes with this.
From a study of railway timetables from Wodehouse's day a Colonel Cobb deduced that the most likely location for Market Blandings station (with the Emsworth Arms opposite) would be Buildwas - but that opens up a whole new field of possibilities.
Not one surviving house fits the bill exactly because Wodehouse changed his original to fit the plots of his stories and eventually regretted setting his paradise in Shropshire in the first place:
"I rashly placed Blandings Castle in Shropshire because my happiest days as a boy were spent near Bridgnorth, overlooking the fact that to get to the heart of Shropshire takes four hours (or did in my time. No doubt British Railways have cut it down a lot)."
"This meant that my characters were barred from popping up to London and popping back in the same afternoon, which is so essential to characters in the sort of stories I write. Kent or Sussex would have served me better."
It was not just the Blandings Castle saga that was based on Shropshire and our particular part of it.
In his early writings Wodehouse plundered the countryside around Stableford for place names.
Norman Murphy says that Plum's first six books borrow the topography of Stableford for his school story settings: Badgwick Dingle, Worbury, Rutton, Chesterton, Eckleton, Wrykyn, Worfield, Brindleford, Much Middleton - all names equating to, or taken directly from, here.
So, if there is to be a spiritual home for the canon of works penned by P.G., for the immortal characters he created and the unending laughter he has inspired, the area between Shifnal and Bridgnorth must be number one contender.
If Ludlow can lay claim to A.E. Housman, Shifnal to Dickens's Little Nell and even Cleobury Mortimer has the poet-postman Simon Evans - should not Bridgnorth make more of this literary and performing arts goldmine?
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