Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There is always time for failure
Success is good for the character.
Never believe a rumour until you hear it officially denied.
Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.
Irritable Judges suffer from a bad case of premature adjudication.
We may not be the creme de la creme, but we are the creme de la scum.
Marriage is like pleading guilty to an indefinite sentence. Without parole.
Hell must be a place where you are only allowed to read what you agree with.
The old middle-class prerogative of being permanently in a most filthy temper.
The greatest horrors of our world are committed by people who are totally sincere.
The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.
We don't know much about the human conscience, except that it is soluble in alcohol.
Never shake hands with colleagues in court; the customers think you're making deals.
There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.
The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.
To escape jury duty in England, wear a bowler hat and carry a copy of the Daily telegraph.
I think being dead isn't any problem. It's the process of dying which is quite off-putting.
The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt.
All the flower children were as alike as a congress of accountants and about as interesting.
The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they're not going to succeed.
It is desperately important to remember when enough is enough, when you've finished the scene.
No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails.
A war against terrorism is an impracticable conception if it means fighting terrorism with terrorism.
The point at which beliefs meet may be more significant, more useful to contemplate, than their sources.
Knowing the law is not much help for an advocate. In fact, it's a bit of a disadvantage, cramps your style.
Loyalty to the school to which your parents pay to send you seemed to me like feeling loyalty to Selfridges.
What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.
I knew nothing about farce until I read Puce a l'Oreille, and had no idea what a deadly serious business it is.
I don't think you ever feel a success really because everything could always be done better than you've done it.
The freedom to make a fortune on the stock exchange has been made to sound more alluring than freedom of speech.
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.
Rumpole, you must move with the times." "If I don't like the way the times are moving, I shall refuse to accompany them.
I had inherited what my father called the art of the advocate, or the irritating habit of looking for the flaw in any argument.
Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they're usually quite peaceful and agreeable.
One thing my father said was that if you find yourself in a country where you have to carry papers, you know it has a lousy government.
The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they're not going to succeed, saying: There is life, but it's not for you.
I don't believe in children's books. I think after you've read Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and Huckleberry Finn, you're ready for anything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The hardest thing is to write a play, because you have to hold their attention for two hours, and if you let them go for five minutes, they're gone for good.
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 secret of good health and happiness is to have rather small illnesses throughout your life which you can rely on to stop you doing anything you don't want to do.
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 law seems like a sort of maze through which a client must be led to safety, a collection of reefs, rocks, and underwater hazards through which he or she must be piloted.
No power on earth, however, can abolish the merciless class distinction between those who are physically desirable and the lonely, pallid, spotted, silent, unfancied majority.
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.