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No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails.

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
Law
Brilliance
Common
Relatively
Sense
Cleaning
Nothing
Nails
Finger
Fingers
Clean
Needed

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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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A war against terrorism is an impracticable conception if it means fighting terrorism with terrorism.
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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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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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All the flower children were as alike as a congress of accountants and about as interesting.
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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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Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.
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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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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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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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To escape jury duty in England, wear a bowler hat and carry a copy of the Daily telegraph.
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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.
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Hell must be a place where you are only allowed to read what you agree with.
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There is always time for failure
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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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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 suppose true sexual equality will come when a general called Anthea is found having an unwise lunch with a young, unreliable model from Spain.
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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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The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.
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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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