116 Quotes by John Mortimer

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.

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

It is desperately important to remember when enough is enough, when you’ve finished the scene.

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

We all come into existence as a result of a momentary embrace by our parents which we find impossible to imagine.

Soapy Sam looked as though he had just sat down on a favourite armchair which had gone missing.

When Fred asked Agnes’s father if that was why he had wanted to become a doctor he got a short answer. ‘Balls! I had no choice. I couldn’t pass the bloody exams to be a vet.

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.

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.