John Mortimer Quotes

46 quotes in 678 categories

• 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.
• 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…
• What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.
• Marriage is like pleading guilty to an indefinite sentence. Without parole.
• 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…
• Loyalty to the school to which your parents pay to send you seemed to me like feeling loyalty to Selfridges.
• We may not be the creme de la creme, but we are the creme de la scum.
• 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…
• To escape jury duty in England, wear a bowler hat and carry a copy of the Daily telegraph.
• Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.
• The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.
• No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails.
• I had inherited what my father called the art of the advocate, or the irritating habit of looking for the flaw in any argument.
• The old middle-class prerogative of being permanently in a most filthy temper.
• It is desperately important to remember when enough is enough, when you've finished the scene.
• We don't know much about the human conscience, except that it is soluble in alcohol.
• 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…
• Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls. The ageing process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off…
• There is always time for failure
• I found criminal clients easy and matrimonial clients hard. Matrimonial clients hate each other so much and use their children to hurt each other in…

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