Mordecai Richler Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Doctors, Essence, Problem

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

  51 Copy quote

• Canada is one of the few places left where the small decencies are observed. If, as a young man, I was scornful of the country because we always seemed so far behind style-setting New York, I now thank God for the cultural lag. Ours, after all, is the good neighbourhood. A society well worth preserving.

  Mordecai Richler

  Country, New York, Men

  33 Copy quote

• When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent.

  Mordecai Richler

  Dad, Children, Growing Up

  40 Copy quote

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

  Mordecai Richler

  Guy, Three, Sides

  Mordecai Richler (1955). “Son of a smaller hero: a novel”

  22 Copy quote

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

  Mordecai Richler

  Writing, Upset, Betrayed

  29 Copy quote

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

  Mordecai Richler

  Beauty, Men, Dancer

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Views, Choices, Belief

  Mordecai Richler (1955). “Son of a smaller hero: a novel”

  20 Copy quote

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

  Mordecai Richler

  Funny, Edmonton, World

  15 Copy quote

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

  Mordecai Richler

  Boys, Men, Two

  Mordecai Richler (1999). “The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz”, p.328, Simon and Schuster

  23 Copy quote

• Each man creates god in his own image.

  Mordecai Richler

  Men

  Mordecai Richler (1955). “Son of a smaller hero: a novel”

  15 Copy quote

• I must speak the truth, even at the risk of being ostracized by my fellow scribblers. In fact, anticipating their rage, I have already applied for a place in the Canada Council's witness-protection program. This because, much as it pains me to turn on my kind, I fear the time has come to admit that far too many celebrated writers were outrageous liars, philanderers, drunks, druggies, unsuitable babysitters, plagiarists, psychopaths, parasites, cowards, indifferent dads or moms and bad credit risks.

  Mordecai Richler

  Mom, Pain, Dad

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Eight, Class, Ethics

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Monday, Two, Age

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Frustration, Dying

  15 Copy quote

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

  Mordecai Richler

  Revolution, Capitalism

  Mordecai Richler (2010). “Cocksure”, p.142, Emblem Editions

  7 Copy quote

• My enduring feeling about René Lévesque is that if he had chosen to hang me, even as he tightened the rope round my neck, he would have complained about how humiliating it was for him to spring the trapdoor. And then, once I was swinging in the wind, he would blame my ghost for having obliged him to murder, thereby imposing a guilt trip on a sweet, self-effacing, downtrodden Francophone.

  Mordecai Richler

  Sweet, Spring, Self

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Yesterday, Waiting, Today

  8 Copy quote

• In, 1950, at the age, 19 I dropped out of St. George William College in Montreal, as it then was, and sailed for England on the Franconia. Foolishly, no arrogantly, believing I could put Canada and its picayune problems behind me, never dreaming it would become the raw material of most of my fiction and non-fiction. Or that I would care so deeply about its surviving intact.

  Mordecai Richler

  Dream, Believe, College

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Growing Up, Ambition, Kids

  Quoted in Time (Canadian ed.), 31 May 1971

  8 Copy quote

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

  Mordecai Richler

  Apology, Self, Wheat

  1971 Of Canada. St Urbain's Horseman, ch.1.

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Voice, People

  9 Copy quote

• Well, people have been wondering what's going to happen to the novel for two hundred years; its death has been announced many times. You know, I think the novel keeps redefining the world we live in. What you should look for in a novel is a window nobody else is looking out of, that nobody else can look through. What you look for is a voice. You pick up a novel by someone such as Faulkner or Hemingway and you just read three pages and you know who wrote it. And that's what one should demand of a novelist.

  Mordecai Richler

  Thinking, Years, Two

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Meaningful, Book, Addiction

  Mordecai Richler (1974). “Notes on an endangered species and others”, Alfred A. Knopf

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Office, Rooms

  9 Copy quote

• Tomorrow country then, tomorrow country now.

  Mordecai Richler

  Country, Tomorrow

  Mordecai Richler, Jonathan Webb, Aislin, Adam Gopnik (2007). “Mordecai Richler Was Here: Selected Writings”, Da Capo Press

  6 Copy quote

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