Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mordecai Richler
Age: 70 †
Born: 1931
Born: January 27
Died: 2001
Died: July 3
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Take
Seriously
Giving
Outside
Writing
Gives
World
Novel
Move
Novels
Opportunity
Journalism
Enjoy
Prefer
Moving
Obviously

More quotes by Mordecai Richler

Image
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
Image
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
Image
The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.
Mordecai Richler
Image
If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.
Mordecai Richler
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Each man creates god in his own image.
Mordecai Richler
Image
In Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn.
Mordecai Richler
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.
Mordecai Richler
Image
So far as one can generalize, the most graciouis, 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.
Mordecai Richler
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Edmonton is not the end of the world but you can certainly see it from there.
Mordecai Richler
Image
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