94 Quotes by Mordecai Richler

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

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  • Author Mordecai Richler
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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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  • Author Mordecai Richler
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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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  • Author Mordecai Richler
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    I don’t 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 I’ve mentioned with the essence.

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  • Author Mordecai Richler
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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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  • Author Mordecai Richler
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    There are ten commandments, right? Well, it’s like an exam. You get eight out of ten, you’re just about top of the class.

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  • Author Mordecai Richler
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    I work every day – or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done, but you don’t earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months, but you don’t earn the fourth without it.

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  • Author Mordecai Richler
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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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  • Author Mordecai Richler
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    But I hate being a grandfather. It’s indecent. In my mind’s eye, I’m 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 I’ve been blessed with a plastic hip-socket replacement, I’m no longer even biodegradable. Environmentalists will protest my burial.

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