John Mortimer

Novelist

1923-04-21

Quotes by John Mortimer

• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.'

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

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• 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.

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

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

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

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• 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.

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• Never shake hands with colleagues in court; the customers think you're making deals.

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• 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.

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