Take sex, for instance.' 'What do you want me to do with it?' 'Try to be serious for a moment. Take the sex life of our father.' [...] Even after a couple of brandies he felt extremely reluctant to discuss sex and his father. 'It's something I'd rather not think about,' he said. 'We all come into existence as a result of a momentary embrace by our parents which find impossible to imagine. [...] We all assume we're the result of our own particular immaculate conception.

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At seventeen he went up to Brasenose College Oxford where he read law though he was actually based at Christ Church because the Brasenose buildings had been requisitioned for the war effort. However Graham Lord's unofficial biography John Mortimer: The Devil's Advocate revealed in 2005 that none of Mortimer's submitted scripts had in fact been used and that the screenplay was actually written by the series producer and director. For the first and in fact the only time in my life I was thanks to Laurie Lee earning my living entirely as a writer.

Sir John Clifford Mortimer CBE QC (21 April 1923 – 16 January 2009) was a British barrister dramatist screenwriter and author.