Quotes from Mordecai Richler

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

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

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

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

You're just as shitty as we are

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.

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

Each man creates god in his own image.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

if I were an angel of the Lord, I would mark the doors of each of my children's homes with an X, so that plague and misfortune would pass over them. Alas, I lack the qualifications. So when there was still world and time enough I fretted. I nagged. I corrected. I got everything wrong.

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.

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.

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.

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

E' un meccanismo difensivo, sai. Tu sei sicuro che uno che non ti ha mai visto ti considererebbe un pezzo di merda, e quindi cerchi di anticiparlo. Rilassati ragazzino. Quando ti conosceranno meglio capiranno che avevano ragione: sei proprio un pezzo di merda.

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.