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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

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John Mortimer
Age: 85 †
Born: 1923
Born: April 21
Died: 2009
Died: January 16
Barrister
Novelist
Poet Lawyer
Screenwriter
Writer
Hampstead Village
Sir John Clifford Mortimer
Sir John Mortimer
John Clifford Mortimer
Spend
Geriatric
Worth
Foregoing
Worry
Ward
Pleasure
Worrying
Three
Extra
Years
Extras
Life
Diets
Refuse

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I had inherited what my father called the art of the advocate, or the irritating habit of looking for the flaw in any argument.
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We may not be the creme de la creme, but we are the creme de la scum.
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All the flower children were as alike as a congress of accountants and about as interesting.
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I found criminal clients easy and matrimonial clients hard. Matrimonial clients hate each other so much and use their children to hurt each other in beastly ways. Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they're usually quite peaceful and agreeable.
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It is desperately important to remember when enough is enough, when you've finished the scene.
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What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.
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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.
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Success is good for the character.
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People will go to endless trouble to divorce one person and then marry someone who is exactly the same, except probably a bit poorer and a bit nastier. I don't think anybody learns anything.
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Hell must be a place where you are only allowed to read what you agree with.
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I don't think you ever feel a success really because everything could always be done better than you've done it.
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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'.
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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.
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I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.
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The officers of the branch of the Force (the Obscene Publications Squad) have a discouraging club tie, on which a book is depicted being cut in half by a larger pair of scissors.
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There is always time for failure
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Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.
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The point at which beliefs meet may be more significant, more useful to contemplate, than their sources.
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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.
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Marriage is like pleading guilty to an indefinite sentence. Without parole.
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