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Age
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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....
-Sir John Mortimer, Murderers & Other Friends
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When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.
-Sir John Mortimer
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Authors & Writing
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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.
-Sir John Mortimer
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The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.
-Sir John Mortimer
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Books
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I don't believe in children's books. I think after you've read Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and Huckleberry Finn, you're ready for anything.
-Sir John Mortimer, Books and Bookmen, May, 1986
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Class
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The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they're not going to succeed, saying: There is life, but it's not for you.
-Sir John Mortimer
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Conscience
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We don't know much about the human conscience, except that it is soluble in alcohol.
-Sir John Mortimer
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Economics
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The freedom to make a fortune on the stock exchange has been made to sound more alluring than freedom of speech.
-Sir John Mortimer
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Education
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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 doctors' surgeries, on stationary trains or watching interviews with politicians, they may have something interesting to think about.
-Sir John Mortimer
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Justice
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'Irritable Judges suffer from a bad case of premature adjudication.'
-Sir John Mortimer
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Theater
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Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.
-Sir John Mortimer
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Books by and about Sir John Mortimer