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.'

John Mortimer

Like childhood, old age is irresponsible, reckless, and foolhardy. Children and old people have everything to gain and nothing much to lose. It's middle-age which is cursed by the desperate need to cling to some finger-hold halfway up the mountain, to conform, not to cause trouble, to behave well.

John Mortimer

childhood children people

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

John Mortimer

nails common-sense law

The greatest horrors of our world are committed by people who are totally sincere.

John Mortimer

horror our-world people

Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls. The ageing 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.

John Mortimer

dying running laughing

When... I told my father I wanted to be a writer, he had asked me to consider my unfortunate wife, who would have me about the house all day 'wearing a dressing gown, brewing tea and stumped for words'.

John Mortimer

wife house father

We don't know much about the human conscience, except that it is soluble in alcohol.

John Mortimer

alcohol humans knows

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

secret advice life

Never believe a rumour until you hear it officially denied.

John Mortimer

rumours belief believe

Hell must be a place where you are only allowed to read what you agree with.

John Mortimer

agree where-you-are hell

There is always time for failure

John Mortimer

What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.

John Mortimer

panic starting-out voice

I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth foregoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.

John Mortimer

three worry years

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

lonely class beauty

Loyalty to the school to which your parents pay to send you seemed to me like feeling loyalty to Selfridges.

John Mortimer

loyalty parent school

The law seems like a sort of maze through which a client must be led to safety, a collection of reefs, rocks, and underwater hazards through which he or she must be piloted.

John Mortimer

rocks safety law

Writing about the indignities of old age: the daunting stairway to the restaurant restroom, the benefits of a wheelchair in airports and its disadvantages at cocktail parties, giving the user what he described as a child's-eye view of the party and a crotch-level view of the guests. Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls. 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.

John Mortimer

party running children

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

John Mortimer

bores found writing

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

choices knowing mistake

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

exclamation-marks strong imagination

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

John Mortimer

yogurt milk writing