John Mortimer Quotes
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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.
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There is always time for failure
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No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails.
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I knew nothing about farce until I read Puce a l'Oreille, and had no idea what a deadly serious business it is.
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The old middle-class prerogative of being permanently in a most filthy temper.
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Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.
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Never believe a rumour until you hear it officially denied.
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We may not be the creme de la creme, but we are the creme de la scum.
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Do we want blanks, asterisks and exclamation marks which people can fill in with their own imaginations, or are we prepared and strong enough to tolerate, even if we do not approve, the strong Anglo-Saxon, realistic and vivid language?
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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.
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There's more of yourself in a book than a play. that's why we know all about Dickens and not much about Shakespeare. Ben Jonson murdered people; Marlowe was a spy; Shakespeare just sat in the corner and took notes.
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My father, to whom I owe so much, never told me the difference between right and wrong; now I think that's why I remain so greatly in his debt.
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Loyalty to the school to which your parents pay to send you seemed to me like feeling loyalty to Selfridges.
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A war against terrorism is an impracticable conception if it means fighting terrorism with terrorism.
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The main aim of education should be to send children out into the world with a reasonably sized anthology in their heads so that, while seated on the lavatory, waiting in doctors' surgeries, on stationary trains or watching interviews with politicians, they may have something interesting to think about.
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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 beastly ways. Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they're usually quite peaceful and agreeable.
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On the three pigs he and his wife own: "We acquired the pigs last year. My wife was born on a pig farm and has always been very fond of pigs. Of course, they are for eating, which is why they are named Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. You wouldn’t want to eat Rufus, Marcus and Esmeralda.
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We don't know much about the human conscience, except that it is soluble in alcohol.
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Irritable Judges suffer from a bad case of premature adjudication.
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All the flower children were as alike as a congress of accountants and about as interesting.
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I don't think you ever feel a success really because everything could always be done better than you've done it.
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The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.
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The law seems like a sort of maze through which a client must be led to safety, a collection of reefs, rocks, and underwater hazards through which he or she must be piloted.
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Marriage is like pleading guilty to an indefinite sentence. Without parole.
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Never shake hands with colleagues in court; the customers think you're making deals.
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Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they're usually quite peaceful and agreeable.
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I don't believe in children's books. I think after you've read Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and Huckleberry Finn, you're ready for anything.
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What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.
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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.
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When... I told my father I wanted to be a writer, he had asked me to consider my unfortunate wife, who would have me about the house all day 'wearing a dressing gown, brewing tea and stumped for words'.
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