Mordecai Richler quotes

Mordecai Richler was a Canadian author, essayist, and screenwriter, acclaimed for his sharp wit and satirical style. His novels, such as "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz," explore themes of identity, ambition, and Jewish-Canadian life. He is remembered as one of Canada’s most influential literary voices. Here are 15 of his quotes:

So far as one can generalize, the most gracious, 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

My enduring feeling about René Lévesque is that if he had chosen to hang me, even as he tightened the rope round my neck, he would have complained about how humiliating it was for him to spring the trapdoor. And then, once I was swinging in the wind, he would blame my ghost for having obliged him to murder, thereby imposing a guilt trip on a sweet, self-effacing, downtrodden Francophone.

Mordecai Richler

The chief rabbi of the underworld, that's me.

Mordecai Richler

In Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn.

Mordecai Richler

Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish, the famine; and Jews, the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared of the Americans on one side and of the bush on the other.

Mordecai Richler

I was a voracious reader, but you would be mistaken if you took that as evidence of my quality.

Mordecai Richler

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

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

Mordecai Richler

Everybody writes a book too many.

Mordecai Richler

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

We live in the country, and I have a huge library there. When we go to London for the winter I never know which books to take. I never know what I am going to need. That's the only disadvantage.

Mordecai Richler

The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.

Mordecai Richler

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

Mordecai Richler