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

Canada is one of the few places left where the small decencies are observed. If, as a young man, I was scornful…

— Mordecai Richler

I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me…

— Mordecai Richler

I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done, but you…

— Mordecai Richler

I'm world-famous ... all over Canada.

— Mordecai Richler

Tomorrow country then, tomorrow country now.

— Mordecai Richler

My enduring feeling about René Lévesque is that if he had chosen to hang me, even as he tightened the rope round…

— Mordecai Richler

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

— Mordecai Richler

The Canadian kid who wants to grow up to be Prime Minister isn't thinking big, he is setting a limit to his…

— Mordecai Richler

When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will…

— Mordecai Richler

Some of the attitudes of Barney are certainly attitudes I share, but not all.

— Mordecai Richler

The revolution eats its own. Capitalism re-creates itself.

— Mordecai Richler

Thousands of miles of wheat, indifference, and self- apology.

— 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

Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with,…

— Mordecai Richler

Nothing is absolute any longer. There is a choice of beliefs and a choice of truths to go with them. If you…

— Mordecai Richler

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

— Mordecai Richler

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

— Mordecai Richler

Edmonton is not the end of the world but you can certainly see it from there.

— Mordecai Richler

There are ten commandments, right? Well, it's like an exam. You get eight out of ten, you're just about top of the…

— Mordecai Richler

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

I had, like any other young novelist, started out by believing the difficult thing was to get published and that, once you…

— Mordecai Richler

Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.

— Mordecai Richler

So far as one can generalize, the most graciouis, cultivated, and innovative people in this country are French Canadians. Certainly they have…

— Mordecai Richler

Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in…

— Mordecai Richler