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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

More quotes by Mordecai Richler

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There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy's. And the right side.
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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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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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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.
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Each man creates god in his own image.
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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.
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And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier?
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I'm world-famous ... all over Canada.
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.
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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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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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Edmonton is not the end of the world but you can certainly see it from there.
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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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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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
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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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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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If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.
Mordecai Richler
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Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.
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