John Mortimer Quotes

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.

Sport, as I have discovered, fosters international hostility and leads the audience, no doubt from boredom, to assault and do grievous bodily harm while watching it. The fact that audiences at the National Theatre rarely break bottles over one another's heads, and that Opera fans seldom knee one another in the groin during the long intervals at Covent Garden, convinces me that theatre is safer than sport.

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.

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.

He's a cabinet minister and his mother was a cook. My father was a doctor and I'm a cook. Perhaps I passed him on the way down, or did he pass me on the way up?

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

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

The old middle-class prerogative of being permanently in a most filthy temper.

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.

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

Alfie Dawlish. Invented all sorts of imaginary ailments for the family at the Manor so he could rob them and treat the village for nothing. It was his primitive version of the Health Service

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

In the middle of the swinging sixties people in England were apparently under some sort of obligation to have a good time and most of them didn't. A Russian and an American walked about in space to no one's particular advantage. The Beatles received their British Empire medals and, so it was said, smoked cannabis in the lavatories at Buckingham Palace. American aeroplanes were bombing Vietnam, but no one seemed to talk about the nuclear holocaust any more.

Up the stairs I found an imposing headquarters, decorated with the portraits and busts of solemn, whiskered old darlings who, no doubt, bled their customers with leeches and passed on the information to alarmed small boys that self-abuse leads to blindness.

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.

Oh, you think everyone's interesting. That's because you're a Red. I don't. I believe that quite a lot of people were just manufactured when God was thinking of something else.

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 doctor's surgeries, on stationary trains or watching interviews with politicians, they have something interesting to think about.

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

She felt a tightness in her chest and sent for Dr Simcox.
'What's the trouble?'
'Look out there, that's the trouble! It's so green and quiet and it's always bloody raining.'
'That's England, Mrs Mallard-Greene. I'm afraid there's no known cure for it.

She who must be obeyed, by Horace Rumpole character

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

It is desperately important to remember when enough is enough, when you've finished the scene.

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.

Take sex, for instance.'
'What do you want me to do with it?'
'Try to be serious for a moment. Take the sex life of our father.'
[ ... ]
Even after a couple of brandies he felt extremely reluctant to discuss sex and his father. 'It's something I'd rather not think about,' he said. 'We all come into existence as a result of a momentary embrace by our parents which find impossible to imagine. [ ... ] We all assume we're the result of our own particular immaculate conception.

My customary exercise consists of a short stroll from the Temple tube to Equity Court, and rising to object to impertinent questions put by prosecuting counsel.

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

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

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.

Dr Rahmat thrust his hand between her legs, tried to kiss her and suggested that there was time for a quick one.'

'Meaning sexual intercourse?' Sir Hector was clearly not about to take the view that my client was offering his patient a small sherry.

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

LIf someone tries to steal your watch, by all means fight them off. If someone sues you for your watch, hand it over and be glad you got away so lightly.

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

This soirée was followed by a longer and more serious session in Pommeroy's, which had ended once again, I regret to say, with Henry and me recalling the great hits of Dame Vera Lynn. So now I turned my face to the wall, closed my eyes and knew what it was like to stand on the edge of eternity.

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

She believed that, in an ideal world, the working class would rule the country, but she had no particular desire to ask any of them to tea.

We don't know much about the human conscience, except that it is soluble in alcohol.

On the cover of this publication a bikini-clad young woman disported herself with a medicine ball, both articles looking as though they had been inflated with a bicycle pump.