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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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Mordecai Richler
Age: 70 †
Born: 1931
Born: January 27
Died: 2001
Died: July 3
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Thinking
Limits
Ambitions
Early
Minister
Grow
Ministers
Wants
Settings
Grows
Limit
Rather
Prime
Bigs
Setting
Kids
Ambition
Canadian

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Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm world-famous ... all over Canada.
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The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.
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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.
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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.
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If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Edmonton is not the end of the world but you can certainly see it from there.
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Each man creates god in his own image.
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In Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn.
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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