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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.

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
Time
Politician
Diminished
People
Exciting
Cultivated
Certainly
Innovative
Given
Greatly
Place
French
Trudeau
Without
Canada
Generalize
Country
Politicians
Exceedingly
Would
Boring
Canadians

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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In Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn.
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Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.
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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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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'm world-famous ... all over Canada.
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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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There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy's. And the right side.
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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And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier?
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Each man creates god in his own image.
Mordecai Richler