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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

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Mordecai Richler
Age: 70 †
Born: 1931
Born: January 27
Died: 2001
Died: July 3
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Right
Commandments
Like
Ethics
Ten
Eight
Morality
Class
Wells
Well
Exam

More quotes by Mordecai Richler

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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy's. And the right side.
Mordecai Richler
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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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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
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The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.
Mordecai Richler
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In Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn.
Mordecai Richler
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If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.
Mordecai Richler
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Each man creates god in his own image.
Mordecai Richler
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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
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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
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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
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Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.
Mordecai Richler
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And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier?
Mordecai Richler
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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
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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
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I'm world-famous ... all over Canada.
Mordecai Richler