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Marriage is like pleading guilty to an indefinite sentence. Without parole.

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
Guilty
Marriage
Without
Like
Parole
Indefinite
Pleading
Sentence
Sentences

More quotes by John Mortimer

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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 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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A war against terrorism is an impracticable conception if it means fighting terrorism with terrorism.
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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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We may not be the creme de la creme, but we are the creme de la scum.
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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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Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls. The ageing process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous.
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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.
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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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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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There is always time for failure
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Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.
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Never believe a rumour until you hear it officially denied.
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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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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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Success is good for the character.
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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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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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Hell must be a place where you are only allowed to read what you agree with.
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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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