Mordecai Richler Quotes

If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.

A boy can be two, three, four potential people, but a man is only one. He murders the others.

There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy's. And the right side.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Edmonton is not the end of the world but you can certainly see it from there.

Each man creates god in his own image.

Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.

In Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn.

If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.

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.

Actually, when it comes to knocking the Canadian cultural scene, nobody outdoes Canadians, myself included. We are veritable masters of self-deprecation.

The revolution eats its own. Capitalism re-creates itself.

Wherever I travel I'm too late. The orgy has moved elsewhere.

Tomorrow country then, tomorrow country now.

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.

Thousands of miles of wheat, indifference, and self- apology.

The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.

Listen your Lordship, I'm a respecter of institutions. Even in Paris, I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish, but I didn't inhale.

And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier?

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.

A novel may take anywhere from two to five years to write and, in the end, you might manage a couple of thousand dollars on it, no more.

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.

I'm world-famous ... all over Canada.

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.

It is no more expected of most producers to read a book than it is, say, of Ted Williams to dust off home plate.

Shame on you. Don't tell me you've been married for an hour and you've already got eyes for another woman.

And what if Miriam and I were never to be reconciled?

It seems to me that our lives are consumed by countless wasting years, but only a few shining moments. I missed mine. Yes is what I should have said. Of course I should have said yes.

Fundamentally all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying about the brief flicker of time we have here and the frustrations that it creates.

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.

Actually when it comes to knocking the Canadian cultural scene nobody outdoes Canadians myself included. We are veritable masters of self-deprecation.

Listen your Lordship I'm a respecter of institutions. Even in Paris I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish but I didn't inhale.

Bad days my memory functions no better than an out-of-focus kaleidoscope, but other days me recall is painfully perfect.

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.

I'm rambling again. Wandering off the point. But this is the true story of my wasted life...

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.

Without a doubt, it [Canada] is the land God gave to Cain.

Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.

In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings. Neither am I a stranger to irony.

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.