Explore Quotes by John Mortimer

Check-ups are, in my experience, a grave mistake; all they do is allow the quack of your choice to tell you that you have some sort of complaint that you were far happier not knowing about.

We don't know much about the human conscience, except that it is soluble in alcohol.

It is desperately important to remember when enough is enough, when you've finished the scene.

The old middle-class prerogative of being permanently in a most filthy temper.

I had inherited what my father called the art of the advocate, or the irritating habit of looking for the flaw in any argument.

No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails.

The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

To escape jury duty in England, wear a bowler hat and carry a copy of the Daily telegraph.

The secret of good health and happiness is to have rather small illnesses throughout your life which you can rely on to stop you doing anything you don't want to do.

We may not be the creme de la creme, but we are the creme de la scum.

Loyalty to the school to which your parents pay to send you seemed to me like feeling loyalty to Selfridges.

I'd been told of all the things you're meant to feel when your father dies. Sudden freedom, growing up, the end of dependence, the step into the sunlight when no one is taller than you and you're in no one's shadow. I know what I felt. Lonely.

I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth foregoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.

Marriage is like pleading guilty to an indefinite sentence. Without parole.

What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.

I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.

The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they're not going to succeed, saying: There is life, but it's not for you.

Rumpole, you must move with the times." "If I don't like the way the times are moving, I shall refuse to accompany them.

The people look forbidding, solemn, marked by that impossible ideal, Communism, which, like Christianity, seemed to demand too much of humanity and, falling into the wrong hands, led too easily to horrible brutality.

Writing about the indignities of old age: the daunting stairway to the restaurant restroom, the benefits of a wheelchair in airports and its disadvantages at cocktail parties, giving the user what he described as a child's-eye view of the party and a crotch-level view of the guests. Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls. The aging process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous.