John Mortimer

“I knew early on that I was going to be a writer. I think it's something rather like a curse that you're born with.”

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

“I try and treat my children from the age of ten months as if they were totally grown up, which I think is the only way to treat children.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“It's barrister behaviour to say what you think will appeal to the person you're talking to, whoever it happens to be, whether it's true or not.”

“There is always time for failure.”

“If you're an actor, you get your eyes put out; you get everything done to you.”

“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.”

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

“The hardest thing is to write a play, because you have to hold their attention for two hours, and if you let them go for five minutes, they're gone for good.”

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

“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.”

“One thing my father said was that if you find yourself in a country where you have to carry papers, you know it has a lousy government.”

“Knowing the law is not much help for an advocate. In fact, it's a bit of a disadvantage, cramps your style.”

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

“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.”

“The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they're not going to succeed.”

“I think being dead isn't any problem. It's the process of dying which is quite off-putting.”

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