Mordecai Richler Quotes & Sayings

In those olden times you didn't have to be a space scientist to manage the gadget that flicked your TV on and off, that ridiculous thingamabob that now comes with twenty push buttons, God knows what for. Doctors made house calls. Rabbis were guys. Kids were raised by their moms instead of in child-care pens like piglets. Software meant haberdashery. — Mordecai Richler

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

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

The revolution eats its own. Capitalism re-creates itself. — Mordecai Richler

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

Each man creates god in his own image. — Mordecai Richler

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

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

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

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

I'm world-famous," Dr. Parks said, "all over Canada. — Mordecai Richler

I didn't know about beauty, he had thought. Nobody ever told me. — Mordecai Richler

I'm world-famous ... all over Canada. — Mordecai Richler

We could never agree about Boogie and I didn't share Miriam's reverence for professors. In fact, just in case I haven't mentioned it before, the pride of my office wall is my framed high-school graduation certificate, lit from above. Miriam has reproached me for it. "Take it down, darling," she once pleaded. But it still hangs there. — Mordecai Richler

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

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

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

I thought, breaking into a sweat, I'd better call Saul. I owe Kate an apology ... Damn damn damn. — Mordecai Richler

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

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

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

Some of the attitudes of Barney are certainly attitudes I share, but not all. — Mordecai Richler

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

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

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

Everybody writes a book too many. — Mordecai Richler

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

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

Thousands of miles of wheat, indifference, and self- apology. — Mordecai Richler

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

Wherever I travel I'm too late. The orgy has moved elsewhere, — Mordecai Richler

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

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

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

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

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

But I hate being a grandfather. It's indecent. In my mind's eye, I'm still twenty-five. Thirty-three max. Certainly not sixty-seven, reeking of decay and dashed hopes. My breath sour. My limbs in dire need of a lube job. And now that I've been blessed with a plastic hip-socket replacement, I'm no longer even biodegradable. Environmentalists will protest my burial. — Mordecai Richler

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

If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn't to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island. — Mordecai Richler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Following the death of his wife, Sam Johnson wrote to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, "I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wilds of life, without any certain direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on a world to which I have little relation."
But my wife wasn't dead, merely absent. — Mordecai Richler

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

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

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

One final thought. In the years leading up to my trial, whenever I was caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the highway leading to my cottage, creeping along behind a battered, rust eaten pick-up truck with a sticker on its rear bumper that read JESUS SAVES, I used to think don't count on it, buster. Now I am no longer sure. — Mordecai Richler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid. — Mordecai Richler

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