Quotes by Mordecai Richler

“Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials.”

“Remember this, Griffin. The revolution eats its own. Capitalism recreates itself.”

“Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; its about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.”

If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasnt to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggys Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island.

Shame on you. Dont tell me youve been married for an hour and youve already got eyes for another woman.

I dont 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 Ive mentioned with the essence.

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 youre 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.

It seems to me that our lives are consumed by countless wasting years, but only a few shining moments. I missed mine. Yes is what I should have said. Of course I should have said yes.

Following the death of his wife, Sam Johnson wrote to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wilds of life, without any certain direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on a world to which I have little relation. But my wife wasnt dead, merely absent.

Better my right hand should have been cut off. Go know I was setting in motion events that would lead to the ruin of one of the few truly good men I ever met.

...and then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my hearts desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate. Oh yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what shes missing. No, dont.

Bad days my memory functions no better than an out-of-focus kaleidoscope, but other days me recall is painfully perfect.

Im rambling again. Wandering off the point. But this is the true story of my wasted life...

Without a doubt, it [Canada] is the land God gave to Cain.

Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.

In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings. Neither am I a stranger to irony.

But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit.

And what if Miriam and I were never to be reconciled?

But I hate being a grandfather. Its indecent. In my minds eye, Im still twenty-five. Thirty-three max. Certainly not sixty-seven, reeking of decay and dashed hopes. My breath sour. My limbs in dire need of a lube job. And now that Ive been blessed with a plastic hip-socket replacement, Im no longer even biodegradable. Environmentalists will protest my burial.

Cripples are not the stuff of romance. Only Lord Byron, dragging his club foot, springs to mind as an exception to the rule, but such a failing in a man is regarded as interesting, even provocative, rather than disfiguring. Women must submit to a more exacting measure.