Top 58 John Mortimer Quotes
#1. I remember talking to John Mortimer, and he said he was relying on Rumpole to keep him in his old age; well, I'm doing the same with Phryne - she's my mainstay.
Kerry Greenwood
#2. 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.
John Mortimer
#3. Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.
John Mortimer
#4. We may not be the creme de la creme, but we are the creme de la scum.
John Mortimer
#5. Marriage is like pleading guilty to an indefinite sentence. Without parole.
John Mortimer
#6. 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.
John Mortimer
#7. It is desperately important to remember when enough is enough, when you've finished the scene.
John Mortimer
#8. Rumpole, you must move with the times."
"If I don't like the way the times are moving, I shall refuse to accompany them.
John Mortimer
#9. We don't know much about the human conscience, except that it is soluble in alcohol.
John Mortimer
#10. 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
#11. 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.
John Mortimer
#12. I sent out words like soldiers to battle and they never returned.
John Mortimer
#13. He is a pale, long faced, unsmiling fellow who probably lives on a diet of organic bran and carrot juice. He heard Ballard open the proceedings against La Maison with a pained expression, and looked at me over his half-glasses as though I were a saucepan that hadn't been washed up properly.
John Mortimer
#14. 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
#15. She who must be obeyed, by Horace Rumpole character
John Mortimer
#16. Soapy Sam looked as though he had just sat down on a favourite armchair which had gone missing.
John Mortimer
#17. A war against terrorism is an impracticable conception if it means fighting terrorism with terrorism.
John Mortimer
#18. I don't think you ever feel a success really because everything could always be done better than you've done it ...
John Mortimer
#19. 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
John Mortimer
#20. 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.
John Mortimer
#22. Never believe a rumour until you hear it officially denied.
John Mortimer
#23. 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
#24. A hundred pounds! He couldn't remember ever having seen a hundred pounds, all at one time. He found himself envying his father, who had nothing to worry about except the future of mankind.
John Mortimer
#25. What borders on the criminal is the poor teaching and neglect of those subjects that deal with the history of ideas and ideals, a knowledge of which is essential to all youth who would assume their place in society as thinking, feeling human beings.
John Mortimer Smith
#26. 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.
John Mortimer
#27. Loyalty to the school to which your parents pay to send you seemed to me like feeling loyalty to Selfridges.
John Mortimer
#28. 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.
John Mortimer
#29. No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails.
John Mortimer
#30. 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.
John Mortimer
#31. The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they're not going to succeed.
John Mortimer
#32. 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
#33. You can't change people. You know that. You can't make them stop hating each other, or longing to blow up the world, not by walking through the rain and singing to a small guitar. Most you can do for them is pull them out of the womb, thump them on the backside and let them get on with it.
John Mortimer
#34. The old middle-class prerogative of being permanently in a most filthy temper.
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. Pope John's advisers were worried about the freedom to speak and to come and go to and from the council.
Ian Mortimer
#37. The point at which beliefs meet may be more significant, more useful to contemplate, than their sources.
John Mortimer
#38. To escape jury duty in England, wear a bowler hat and carry a copy of the Daily telegraph.
John Mortimer
#39. 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?
John Mortimer
#40. 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
#41. The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.
John Mortimer
#42. Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they're usually quite peaceful and agreeable.
John Mortimer
#43. 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.
John Mortimer
#44. What on earth was Henry talking about?'
'His soul. I wonder where he keeps it.
John Mortimer
#45. All the flower children were as alike as a congress of accountants and about as interesting.
John Mortimer
#46. 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
#47. The only rule I have found to have any validity is writing is not to bore yourself.
John Mortimer
#48. The freedom to make a fortune on the stock exchange has been made to sound more alluring than freedom of speech.
John Mortimer
#49. 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
#51. The first sight of the Rapstone Valley is of something unexpectedly isolated and uninterruptedly rural; a solitary jogger is the only outward sign of urban pollution.
John Mortimer
#52. 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
#53. 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.
John Mortimer
#54. What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.
John Mortimer
#55. The individual who is best prepared for any occupation is the one able to adapt himself to any situation.
John Mortimer Smith
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
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