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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.

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
Voice
Work
Obsesses
Stricken
Panic
Search
Lifetime
Starting
Writer

More quotes by John Mortimer

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The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.
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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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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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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.
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I knew nothing about farce until I read Puce a l'Oreille, and had no idea what a deadly serious business it is.
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Marriage is like pleading guilty to an indefinite sentence. Without parole.
John Mortimer
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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.
John Mortimer
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Never believe a rumour until you hear it officially denied.
John Mortimer
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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.
John Mortimer
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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.
John Mortimer
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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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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.
John Mortimer
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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.
John Mortimer
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To escape jury duty in England, wear a bowler hat and carry a copy of the Daily telegraph.
John Mortimer
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Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.
John Mortimer
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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.
John Mortimer
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There is always time for failure
John Mortimer
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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
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A war against terrorism is an impracticable conception if it means fighting terrorism with terrorism.
John Mortimer
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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.
John Mortimer