John Mortimer Quotes

I'm not a lawyer, but I do know this: we need to protect our ability to tell controversial stories.

I could never be on stage on my own. But puppets can say things that humans can't say.

You have to work with what you are given, even in Shakespeare. we have our form and it is important that we free ourselves through it.

English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.

An actor cannot be a censor. I'm there to interpret.

Vulgarity begins when imagination succumbs to the explicit.

In Japan, people don't really sing about sexual content.

I will not compromise on language or content. At 15, people can handle the same language as me, they're just as complicated as me and are very interested in thinking about important questions for the first time.

Radio allowed me to be a creator, and TV stole that creation from me by literalizing - and to some extent limiting - my vision.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

In the United States, viewers don't get to see a lot of things we can show in other countries. We didn't get to show our naked Twister game from Wild On Jamaica, but we definitely filmed it.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

For me, nudity and strong language have never been huge loadbearing elements of how I like to tell a story. Graphic images certainly are.

It's liberating to perform in another language. There are some subjects I would never talk about in French, where they see me as a public figure, that I talk about in English.

Political correctness may make for smooth edges, but it does little for the imagination and nothing for the arts. Writers work best when they are exploring at the outer limits of what is traditional, acceptable, or conventional.

Imagine a world without art: it's George Orwell's nightmare!

I've no problems with cuss words. All of us use them. Those who say they don't are lying. People can tolerate English cuss words but find the Hindi ones a bit revolting.

But it's hard to talk about art. Maybe there should be a law against it, some First Amendment gag order like crying fire in a crowded theater.

Then what shall I write? I can't just write that this happened then this happened then this happened to boring infinitum. I'll let my journal grow just like the mind does, just like a tree or beast does, just like life does. Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line? Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.

Clive [Davis] tried to tell me that saying certain words in a song - or as he says, 'putting some balls into it' - isn't bad, it's just strong emotion. Well, there are certain words and emotions I don't want kids hearing, and I'm not changing because they think it's going to sell better. This is going to sound horrible, but I got 12 million votes doing what I did.

In principle, any abstraction of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it.

Fantasy is an 'F' word that hopefully the five second delay won't do anything with.

Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.