JOHN MORTIMER

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

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

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.

There is always time for failure.

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

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

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

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.

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

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

Would the world be any more dangerous if we did without secrets all together.

Champagne Socialist

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

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.

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.

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

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.'

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.

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.

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.

Life as a barrister never was terribly real to me, and courtrooms were always a place of fantasy to me. They had nothing to do with discovering the truth, really, of course.

There are lots of similarities between being a writer and a lawyer: to tell a story to a jury, hold their attention, make them laugh, make them like you. But what makes being a barrister less satisfying than being a writer is, finally, that it's about what someone else wants you to say.

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