Top 69 Quotes & Sayings by John Mortimer

It's barrister behaviour to say what you think will appeal to the person you're talking to, whoever it happens to be, whether it's true or not.

I try and treat my children from the age of ten months as if they were totally grown up, which I think is the only way to treat children.

The hardest thing is to write a play, because you have to hold their attention for two hours, and if you let them go for five minutes, they're gone for good.

Knowing the law is not much help for an advocate. In fact, it's a bit of a disadvantage, cramps your style.

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

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.

Voting Liberal is a non-thing. Historically, it might be a good idea to have a Conservative government, because change is a good thing. But I don't know that I could bring myself to vote Tory.

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

I knew early on that I was going to be a writer. I think it's something rather like a curse that you're born with.

There is always time for failure.

All the flower children were as alike as a congress of accountants and about as interesting.

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

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

My father was the doyen of the divorce barristers. He was an extremely erudite and very famous divorce barrister. So that, when I was a little boy in the nursery, instead of a story like 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,' I used to get 'The Duchess and the Seven Correspondents.'

There are lots of similarities between being a writer and a lawyer: to tell a story to a jury, hold their attention, make them laugh, make them like you. But what makes being a barrister less satisfying than being a writer is, finally, that it's about what someone else wants you to say.

If you're an actor, you get your eyes put out; you get everything done to you.

The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they're not going to succeed.

I think being dead isn't any problem. It's the process of dying which is quite off-putting.

There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.

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

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.

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

Life as a barrister never was terribly real to me, and courtrooms were always a place of fantasy to me. They had nothing to do with discovering the truth, really, of course.

One thing my father said was that if you find yourself in a country where you have to carry papers, you know it has a lousy government.

The freedom to make a fortune on the stock exchange has been made to sound more alluring than freedom of speech.

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.

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.

The greatest horrors of our world are committed by people who are totally sincere.

No power on earth, however, can abolish the merciless class distinction between those who are physically desirable and the lonely, pallid, spotted, silent, unfancied majority.

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.

Like childhood, old age is irresponsible, reckless, and foolhardy. Children and old people have everything to gain and nothing much to lose. It's middle-age which is cursed by the desperate need to cling to some finger-hold halfway up the mountain, to conform, not to cause trouble, to behave well.

The point at which beliefs meet may be more significant, more useful to contemplate, than their sources.

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.

Success is good for the character.

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

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'.

I knew nothing about farce until I read Puce a l'Oreille, and had no idea what a deadly serious business it is.

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.

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

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

People will go to endless trouble to divorce one person and then marry someone who is exactly the same, except probably a bit poorer and a bit nastier. I don't think anybody learns anything.

I don't think you ever feel a success really because everything could always be done better than you've done it.

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.

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.

Never believe a rumour until you hear it officially denied.

I suppose true sexual equality will come when a general called Anthea is found having an unwise lunch with a young, unreliable model from Spain.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt.

Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they're usually quite peaceful and agreeable.

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

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

Hell must be a place where you are only allowed to read what you agree with.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is always time for failure

A war against terrorism is an impracticable conception if it means fighting terrorism with terrorism.

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?

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