John Mortimer

The aging 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.

The freedom to make a fortune on the stock exchange has been made to sound more alluring than freedom of speech.

I think being dead isn't any problem. It's the process of dying which is quite off-putting.

There are lots of similarities between being a writer and a lawyer: to tell a story to a jury, hold their attention, make them laugh, make them like you. But what makes being a barrister less satisfying than being a writer is, finally, that it's about what someone else wants you to say.

My father was the doyen of the divorce barristers. He was an extremely erudite and very famous divorce barrister. So that, when I was a little boy in the nursery, instead of a story like 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,' I used to get 'The Duchess and the Seven Correspondents.'

I knew early on that I was going to be a writer. I think it's something rather like a curse that you're born with.

Life as a barrister never was terribly real to me, and courtrooms were always a place of fantasy to me. They had nothing to do with discovering the truth, really, of course.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.

There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.

It's barrister behaviour to say what you think will appeal to the person you're talking to, whoever it happens to be, whether it's true or not.

I try and treat my children from the age of ten months as if they were totally grown up, which I think is the only way to treat children.