Top 55 Mordecai Richler Quotes
#1. Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.
Mordecai Richler
#2. This is an age of scientific wonders. You miss somebody so you pick up the phone to say hello. Three minutes for sixty-five cents. Nobody goes broke.
Mordecai Richler
#4. Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials.
Mordecai Richler
#5. Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really ... I keep it out of print.
Mordecai Richler
#6. I have always been skeptical of medical orthodoxies, because sooner, rather than later, so many of them are turned on their heads. Or, put another way, providing you are prepared to wait it out, what was adjudged bad for you yesterday is likely to prove beneficial today.
Mordecai Richler
#7. I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.
Mordecai Richler
#8. I'm rambling again. Wandering off the point. But this is the true story of my wasted life ...
Mordecai Richler
#9. And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier?
Mordecai Richler
#10. Bad days my memory functions no better than an out-of-focus kaleidoscope, but other days me recall is painfully perfect.
Mordecai Richler
#12. Obviously the raven with the unquenchable itch was at it again, playing tricks on the world and its creatures. Once by air, he thought, and now by water.
Mordecai Richler
#13. Shame on you. Don't tell me you've been married for an hour and you've already got eyes for another woman.
Mordecai Richler
#14. Nothing is absolute any longer. There is a choice of beliefs and a choice of truths to go with them. If you choose not to choose then there is no truth at all. There are only points of view.
Mordecai Richler
#15. All writing is about the same thing - it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration it creates
Mordecai Richler
#16. There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy's. And the right side.
Mordecai Richler
#17. Actually, when it comes to knocking the Canadian cultural scene, nobody outdoes Canadians, myself included. We are veritable masters of self-deprecation.
Mordecai Richler
#18. But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit.
Mordecai Richler
#19. Wherever I travel I'm too late. The orgy has moved elsewhere,
Mordecai Richler
#20. If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.
Mordecai Richler
#21. I didn't know about beauty, he had thought. Nobody ever told me.
Mordecai Richler
#22. We live in the country, and I have a huge library there. When we go to London for the winter I never know which books to take. I never know what I am going to need. That's the only disadvantage.
Mordecai Richler
#23. Listen your Lordship, I'm a respecter of institutions. Even in Paris, I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish, but I didn't inhale.
Mordecai Richler
#24. The revolution eats its own. Capitalism re-creates itself.
Mordecai Richler
#25. I'm criticized by the feminists, by the Jewish establishment, by Canadian nationalists. And why not? I've had my pot shots at them. I'm fair game.
Mordecai Richler
#26. Better my right hand should have been cut off. Go know I was setting in motion events that would lead to the ruin of one of the few truly good men I ever met.
Mordecai Richler
#27. I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done, but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months, but you don't earn the fourth without it.
Mordecai Richler
#29. A boy can be two, three, four potential people, but a man is only one. He murders the others.
Mordecai Richler
#30. Cripples are not the stuff of romance. Only Lord Byron, dragging his club foot, springs to mind as an exception to the rule, but such a failing in a man is regarded as interesting, even provocative, rather than disfiguring. Women must submit to a more exacting measure.
Mordecai Richler
#31. The truth is Canada is a cloud-cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world out there, where famine and racial strife and vandals in office are the unhappy rule.
Mordecai Richler
#32. You're convinced that anybody who meets you for the first time will consider you a shit, so you take preventive action. Relax, boychick. When they get to know you better they will realize that they were right. You are a shit.
Mordecai Richler
#33. Ernst was still in the Eastern Zone, about ninety kilometres from Berlin, when the truck emerged so inexplicably out of nowhere that it seemed to have been created by the rain itself.
Mordecai Richler
#34. The Canadian kid who wants to grow up to be Prime Minister isn't thinking big, he is setting a limit to his ambitions rather early.
Mordecai Richler
#35. If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.
Mordecai Richler
#36. Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried.
Mordecai Richler
#38. In Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn.
Mordecai Richler
#39. There are ten commandments, right? Well, it's like an exam. You get eight out of ten, you're just about top of the class.
Mordecai Richler
#40. For the record, pot, like the Reader's Digest , is not necessarily habit-forming, but both can lead to hard-core addiction : heroin, in one case, abridged bad books, in the other. Either way you look at it, a withdrawal from a meaningful life.
Mordecai Richler
#41. The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.
Mordecai Richler
#42. Thousands of miles of wheat, indifference, and self- apology.
Mordecai Richler
#43. Do you think she'd mind if, after the dinner, I slipped out for an hour and maybe caught the third period in the Forum?'
'Brides tend to be touchy about things like that.
Mordecai Richler
#45. Without a doubt, it [Canada] is the land God gave to Cain.
Mordecai Richler
#47. All the same, it strikes me as unfair that I still have to defend myself against her moral judgements. My continuing need for her approbation is pathetic. Twice now I have stopped myself on the street to remonstrate with her, a crazy old coot talking to himself.
Mordecai Richler
#48. There's no such thing as a superhuman. But the only thing I got to tell you, if you take a dog and kick him around he's got to be alert, he's got to be more sharper than you. Well, we've been kicked around for two thousand years. We're not more smarter, we're more alert.
Mordecai Richler
#49. And then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart's desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate.
Oh yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what she's missing. No, don't.
Mordecai Richler
#50. I thought, breaking into a sweat, I'd better call Saul. I owe Kate an apology ... Damn damn damn.
Mordecai Richler
#51. Some of the attitudes of Barney are certainly attitudes I share, but not all.
Mordecai Richler
#52. In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings. Neither am I a stranger to irony.
Mordecai Richler
#53. I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.
Mordecai Richler
#54. If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.
Mordecai Richler
#55. Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.
Mordecai Richler
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