Mordecai Richler Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

"I'm world-famous," Dr. Parks said, "all over Canada."

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
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.

Mordecai Richler
Wherever I travel I'm too late. The orgy has moved elsewhere.

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

Mordecai Richler
A boy can be two, three, four potential people, but a man is only one. He murders the others.

Mordecai Richler
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.

Mordecai Richler
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
If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.

Mordecai Richler
There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy's. And the right side.

Mordecai Richler
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
Actually, when it comes to knocking the Canadian cultural scene, nobody outdoes Canadians, myself included. We are veritable masters of self-deprecation.

Mordecai Richler
And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier?

Mordecai Richler