116 Quotes by John Mortimer

Children can spot pomposity, insincerity and self-regard a mile off and are the best possible antidote to such diseases.

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

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

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

There's more of yourself in a book than a play. that's why we know all about Dickens and not much about Shakespeare. Ben Jonson murdered people; Marlowe was a spy; Shakespeare just sat in the corner and took notes.

My father, to whom I owe so much, never told me the difference between right and wrong; now I think that's why I remain so greatly in his debt.

Never shake hands with colleagues in court; the customers think you're making deals.

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

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.