John Mortimer Quotes

Unfortunately for my family, they have a writer in the family.

When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.

I saw myself as a writer, a novelist, even though I was living the life of a mother and housewife. Writing was - and is - what I do.

To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.

I think my parents had in mind that I would settle down at quite a young age, but I decided that being a housewife in a big country house wasn't for me.

I wrote my earliest piece for The Sunday Times about being a young wife.

I love being able to be a writer. That's what I moved to New York to be.

I don't have a life, really. I take my kids to school, and I go home, and I write. Then I go pick my kids up, make them dinner, put them to bed, and write some more.

My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.

I had a series of terrible jobs, whatever would allow me to write for four hours during the day. During that time I wrote three novels - all of which were extraordinarily poor. I decided after that to go and get my MFA.

I advise those who want to become writers to study veterinary medicine, which is easier. You don't want to be a writer unless you have no choice - and if you have no choice, good luck to you.

One danger of a man succeeding is that it teaches his wife and daughter not to worry about success.

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.

If ordinary means I have suddenly got to produce a household of kids and iron Peter's shirts, I'm sorry, I'm not interested.

No one wanted that marriage, no one. Even Mahatma Gandhi wasn't happy about it. As for my father...it's not true that he opposed it, as people say, but he wasn't eager for it. I suppose because the fathers of only daughters would prefer to see them get married as late as possible.

As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers--a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of college students aspire to the writer's trade and where bare hundreds actually break through.

My life is nothing like the Daddy Day Care life. Me around the house is nothing like the Daddy Day Care dad.

You have to remember: the wife been home all day cleaning asses and feeding faces. Sometimes the opposite.

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

I beg of you, you who could and should be bearing and rearing a family: Wives, come home from the typewriter, the laundry, the nursing, come home from the factory, the cafe. No career approaches in importance that of wife, homemaker, mother -- cooking meals, washing dishes, making beds for one's precious husband and children. Come home, wives, to your husbands. Make home a heaven for them. Come home, wives, to your children, born and unborn. Wrap the motherly cloak about you and, unembarrassed, help in a major role to create the bodies for the immortal souls who anxiously await.

My life is gardening, cleaning around the house and power washing. I power wash everything: my wife, the mailman with the f-cking mail, power wash his ass, f-ck my mail up, I don't care.

There's a kind of a line between music and math, so I guess I got the music gene, thank goodness. But my mother wasn't too thrilled. She wanted me to go to university and get a degree or do something, and my father, he liked opera so he wasn't too thrilled either, because he wanted me to be an opera singer and I didn't have - as he said, I don't really have the strength to do that.

Our marriage is like anybody's marriage, It goes through ups and downs. It's a little garden that you have to tend all the time. When we're home, it's not like we walk around all dolled up going, We are celebrities! We are famous! I change diapers. I clean up dog doo.

Running a house should be left to innkeepers.

The man who never in his life Has washed the dishes with his wife Or polished up the silver plate - He still is largely celibate.