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.

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.

I'd been told of all the things you're meant to feel when your father dies. Sudden freedom, growing up, the end of dependence, the step into the sunlight when no one is taller than you and you're in no one's shadow. I know what I felt. Lonely.

Rumpole, you must move with the times." "If I don't like the way the times are moving, I shall refuse to accompany them.

Loyalty to the school to which your parents pay to send you seemed to me like feeling loyalty to Selfridges.

I knew nothing about farce until I read Puce a l'Oreille, and had no idea what a deadly serious business it is.

The point at which beliefs meet may be more significant, more useful to contemplate, than their sources.