John Mortimer Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

John Mortimer
Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

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

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

John Mortimer
If I don't like the way the times are moving, I shall refuse to accompany them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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 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
And in spite of David and Jonathan, Hamlet and Horatio, Caesar and Antony, Bush and Blair, women have a greater gift, I think, for friendship.

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
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
There's no pleasure on earth that's worth sacrificing for the sake of an extra five years in the geriatric ward of the Sunset Old People's Home, Weston-Super-Mare.

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
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
We wondered why we ever thought there was, during the Cold War, any serious danger of Russia conquering the world when they couldn't even deliver the scenery for The Tempest.

John Mortimer