A Quote by John Mortimer

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 laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous.

John Mortimer

Quote Topics

Ageing Appear Dying Gentle Gradual Grow Laughing Matter Off Old Over Process Pushes Ready Ridiculous Runs Should Slapstick Up

Quote Author

John Mortimer
English - Writer
April 21, 1923 - January 16, 2009

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.

John Mortimer

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.

John Mortimer

I had always been led to believe that ageing was a slow and gradual process, the creep of a glacier. Now I realise that it happens in a rush, like snow falling off a roof.

David Nicholls

You grow a whole lot more as a writer by getting old stories out of the house and letting new ones come in and live with you until they grow up and are ready to go. Don't let the old ones stay there and grow fat and cranky and eat all the food out of the refrigerator. You have dozens of generations of stories inside you, but the only way to make room for the new ones is to write the old ones and mail them off.

Orson Scott Card

[When] you're dying laughing because your three-year-old made a fart joke, it doesn't matter what else is going on. That's real happiness.

Gwyneth Paltrow

I find myself laughing at a lot of things, from slapstick to dark humor. I'm pretty much all over the place.

Jim Breuer

I've just tried to grow up in the most natural and gradual process that I possibly can and make choices I feel are right for me and my fans.

Taylor Swift

If you grow up in the suburbs, you hear of people dying of old age, car wrecks, cancer. In the city, it's always people dying of violence or stray bullets.

Suge Knight

We ask these young girls to grow up too fast. In the society where they grow up, they are asked to grow up too fast, and everything pushes them in that direction. The media creates pressure.

Maimouna Doucoure

"Nasty Man" isn't a laughing matter, but you have to laugh anyway. The song, itself, becomes something of a laughing matter because we'd go crazy if we didn't keep laughing.

Joan Baez

Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.

Erma Bombeck

The way that we are going after ageing, I think, is a problem. The modern medical model is basically designed to attack one disease at a time. Independent of all other diseases and independent of the basic process of ageing itself.

S. Jay Olshansky

It doesn't matter which era you play in. Wickets are the only way you can contain. Restricting the batsmen to six runs in the first over may look okay but in the next over they will hammer the other bowler. Giving ten runs and taking a wicket - I'll take that any day.

Wasim Akram

There's a rising cancer trend and, as I said, one of the major contributors is the overall ageing of the population - we aren't dying of other things, so we're dying of cancer.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

It is not strange that that early love of the heart should come back, as it so often does when the dim eye is brightening with its last light. It is not strange that the freshest fountains the heart has ever known in its wastes should bubble up anew when the lifeblood is growing stagnant. It is not strange that a bright memory should come to a dying old man, as the sunshine breaks across the hills at the close of a stormy day; nor that in the light of that ray, the very clouds that made the day dark should grow gloriously beautiful.