Mordecai Quotes

Acquiring a dog may be the only opportunity a human ever has to choose a relative.

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

There will be a meeting of the great powers who will disagree, and the next noise we hear will be the screeching of elevators going up and down from heaven to hell.

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.

If you vote for Al Smith, you're voting against Christ and you will all be damned.

People are ashamed to admit they need a revival.

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.

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

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.

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.

Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials.

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.

We're living under the illusion that we have the power to determine what to do with it.

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

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

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

Tomorrow country then, tomorrow country now.

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

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.

We want a revival to come just in our way. You never saw two revivals come just alike. We must let them come in God's way. People are ashamed to admit they need a revival.

The time is past when Christians in America can take a long spoon and hand the gospel to the black man out the back door.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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. Thats the only disadvantage.

Nothing like a challenging kill.

If you are not willing to take the shame on yourself, you then let it remain on Jesus Christ. You must bear the reproach of your sinful state of indifference, or the cause of our Master must bear it.

You can't touch music, but music can touch you

Everybody writes a book too many.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.