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If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.
Mordecai Richler
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Mordecai Richler
Age: 70 †
Born: 1931
Born: January 27
Died: 2001
Died: July 3
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Friends
Firsts
First
Feel
Caricature
Feels
Caricatures
Writing
Betrayed
Upset
Novel
More quotes by 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
It is no more expected of most producers to read a book than it is, say, of Ted Williams to dust off home plate.
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
If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.
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
There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy's. And the right side.
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
Edmonton is not the end of the world but you can certainly see it from there.
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
The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.
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
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
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
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 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 Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn.
Mordecai Richler
Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.
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
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
