John Mortimer Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

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

John Mortimer
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.

John Mortimer
Are people naturally destructive, immoral, predatory and self-seeking, only to be kept in order by harsh laws and fiercely deterrent mandatory sentences? Or are men and women naturally orderly, merciful, humane and bred with a need for justice and mutual aid? … when it comes to the law some sort of distinction can be drawn. Are you a Shylock or a Bassanio?

John Mortimer
At Harrow, you could have any boy for a box of Cadbury's milk chocolate.

John Mortimer
All I can do is advise you to be very cautious of those who claim to represent you and order you about for your own good.

John Mortimer
The writer, in the eyes of many film producers, still seems to occupy a position of importance somewhere between the wardrobe lady and the tea boy, with this difference: it's often quite difficult to replace the wardrobe lady.

John Mortimer
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.'

John Mortimer
Beliefs about how you live your life, matters of private decision, views best kept for private enjoyment, prejudice or entertainment, can't be imposed by the operation of criminal law. Attempts to enforce such views can only make the government the subject of ridicule.

John Mortimer
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.

John Mortimer
Avoid any restaurant where the waiter arrives with a handful of knives and forks just as you reach the punchline of your best story and says 'Which of you is having fish?'

John Mortimer
In New York, crossing 58th Street from the Plaza Oyster Bar to the Wyndham Hotel, I came up against a huge black man in a long, dark overcoat who said, in deep and threatening tones, "Give me fifty dollars!" I managed to ask him if he would be content with thirty-five and, rather to my surprise, he said, "All right, give me thirty-five dollars!" And so the deal was done.

John Mortimer
No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean fingernails.

John Mortimer
On tantric sex:
I prefer the plumber position. You stay in all day and nobody comes.

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

John Mortimer
If you can't sleep with your own wife wearing a false beard, what can you do?

John Mortimer
When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.

John Mortimer
The "medium is the message" is one of the world's silliest remarks. The message is the message, and it doesn't matter whether you send it by e-mail, a note in a bottle or on a picture postcard. The book, or the poem, or the play is what counts and it doesn't matter if it's written with a pen on a long sheet of ruled paper, as I am writing now, or on the most highly developed word processor. No machine can help with the rhythms of your prose, even if it can spell better than you can.

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

John Mortimer
The officers of this branch of the Force [the Obscene Publications Squad at Scotland Yard] have a discouraging club tie, on which a book is depicted being cut in half by a larger pair of scissors.

John Mortimer
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.

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

John Mortimer
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.

John Mortimer
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'.

John Mortimer
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.

John Mortimer
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.

John Mortimer
The freedom to make a fortune on the Stock Exchange has been made to sound more alluring than freedom of speech.

John Mortimer
I think fidelity is a very good idea—now that I can't walk.

John Mortimer
At school I never minded the lessons. I just resented having to work terribly hard at playing.

John Mortimer
The doctor who makes a friend of his patients, the lawyer who defends death penalty cases in distant countries for no fee, the schoolteacher who opens a child's eyes to a new world of books and poetry - such people do nothing that can be measured in marketplaces. The greatest painters, composers and writers don't offer you choices, they present you with what only they can do, and you must take it or leave it. So when such subjects as the values of the marketplace are discussed, you will probably not have much to contribute. You can repeat a poem in your head and wait until the conversation is over. But if anyone starts talking about "level playing fields," get up and steal quietly from the room.

John Mortimer
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, and it is perhaps mercifully, the period which becomes blurred in the memory, the time when you did nothing more difficult than survive.

John Mortimer