Top 50 John Mortimer Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.”

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

3. “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

4. “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

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

— John Mortimer

6. “We don’t know much about the human conscience, except that it is soluble in alcohol.”

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

9. “Success is good for the character.”

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

11. “Never believe a rumour until you hear it officially denied.”

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

14. “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.”

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

17. “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

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

— John Mortimer

19. “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.”

— John Mortimer

20. “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.”

— John Mortimer

21. “The greatest horrors of our world, from the executions in Iran to the brutalities of the IRA, are committed by people who are totally sincere.”

— John Mortimer

22. “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

23. “They won’t be guilty until twelve honest citizens come back from the jury room and pronounce them so. In this country we’re still hanging on to the presumption of innocence, if only by the skin of our teeth.”

— John Mortimer

24. “Irritable Judges suffer from a bad case of premature adjudication.”

— John Mortimer

25. “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.”

— John Mortimer

26. “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

27. “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.”

— John Mortimer

28. “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.”

— John Mortimer

29. “I don’t believe in children’s books. I think after you’ve read Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and Huckleberry Finn, you’re ready for anything.”

— John Mortimer

30. “Never shake hands with colleagues in court; the customers think you’re making deals.”

— John Mortimer

31. “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

32. “There is always time for failure.”

— John Mortimer

33. “You know we all think, I certainly thought,’ Simeon told him, ‘that our lives are so different from our parents’. We think differently, feel differently, all that sort of thing. But it’s not true, is it? We all find out the same things, and when we’ve found them out, well, then it’s time to go.”

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

35. “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?”

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

37. “Dieting: the only excuse for dieting is poverty.”

— John Mortimer

38. “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

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

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

41. “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.”

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

43. “It is desperately important to remember when enough is enough, when you’ve finished the scene.”

— John Mortimer

44. “We all come into existence as a result of a momentary embrace by our parents which we find impossible to imagine.”

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

46. “When Fred asked Agnes’s father if that was why he had wanted to become a doctor he got a short answer. ‘Balls! I had no choice. I couldn’t pass the bloody exams to be a vet.”

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

48. “So you admit the existence of a God who doesn’t like to be pestered?”

— John Mortimer

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

— John Mortimer

50. “I’ve got no time for blokes who sit in Kathmandu contemplating their navels and putting up with poverty and starvation, and the worst class system outside Bournemouth.”

— John Mortimer