Mordecai Richler quotes

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)
So far as one can generalize, the most gracious, cultivated, and innovative people in this country are French Canadians. Certainly they have given us the most exciting politicians of our time: Trudeau, Lévesque. Without them, Canada would be an exceedingly boring and greatly diminished place. View quote
Mordecai Richler
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. View quote
Mordecai Richler
The chief rabbi of the underworld, that's me. View quote
Mordecai Richler
In Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn. View quote
Mordecai Richler
Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish, the famine; and Jews, the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared of the Americans on one side and of the bush on the other. View quote
Mordecai Richler
I was a voracious reader, but you would be mistaken if you took that as evidence of my quality. View quote
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. View quote
Mordecai Richler
Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials. View quote
Mordecai Richler
Everybody writes a book too many. View quote
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)
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. View quote
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. View quote
Mordecai Richler
The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work. View quote
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. View quote
Mordecai Richler