Top 50 Mordecai Richler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The Canadian kid who wants to grow up to be Prime Minister isn’t thinking big, he is setting a limit to his ambitions rather early.”

— Mordecai Richler

2. “Thousands of miles of wheat, indifference, and self- apology.”

— Mordecai Richler

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

— Mordecai Richler

4. “There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy’s. And the right side.”

— Mordecai Richler

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

— Mordecai Richler

6. “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

7. “Each man creates god in his own image.”

— Mordecai Richler

8. “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

9. “The revolution eats its own. Capitalism re-creates itself.”

— Mordecai Richler

10. “Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.”

— Mordecai Richler

11. “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

12. “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.”

— Mordecai Richler

13. “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.”

— Mordecai Richler

14. “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.”

— Mordecai Richler

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

— Mordecai Richler

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

— Mordecai Richler

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

— Mordecai Richler

18. “If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don’t they will feel betrayed.”

— Mordecai Richler

19. “Oh, dio mio, se fossi un angelo del Signore segnerei con una croce le porte di casa dei miei figli, in modo da tener lontano le sventure e la malattia. Purtroppo, per quell’alto incarico mi mancano i requisiti, e quando avevo ancora un ruolo nelle loro vite sono stato impaziente, critico e punitivo. Sbagliando sempre tutto.”

— Mordecai Richler

20. “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.”

— Mordecai Richler

21. “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

22. “There’s no such thing as a superhuman. But the only thing I got to tell you, if you take a dog and kick him around he’s got to be alert, he’s got to be more sharper than you. Well, we’ve been kicked around for two thousand years. We’re not more smarter, we’re more alert.”

— Mordecai Richler

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

— Mordecai Richler

24. “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.”

— Mordecai Richler

25. “Ernst was still in the Eastern Zone, about ninety kilometres from Berlin, when the truck emerged so inexplicably out of nowhere that it seemed to have been created by the rain itself.”

— Mordecai Richler

26. “The truth is Canada is a cloud-cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world out there, where famine and racial strife and vandals in office are the unhappy rule.”

— Mordecai Richler

27. “Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried.”

— Mordecai Richler

28. “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

29. “And what if Miriam and I were never to be reconciled?”

— Mordecai Richler

30. “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.”

— Mordecai Richler

31. “We could never agree about Boogie and I didn’t share Miriam’s reverence for professors. In fact, just in case I haven’t mentioned it before, the pride of my office wall is my framed high-school graduation certificate, lit from above. Miriam has reproached me for it. “Take it down, darling,” she once pleaded. But it still hangs there.”

— Mordecai Richler

32. “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.”

— Mordecai Richler

33. “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.”

— Mordecai Richler

34. “If you don’t count some of Jehovah’s injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.”

— Mordecai Richler

35. “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.”

— Mordecai Richler

36. “And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier?”

— Mordecai Richler

37. “I have always been skeptical of medical orthodoxies, because sooner, rather than later, so many of them are turned on their heads. Or, put another way, providing you are prepared to wait it out, what was adjudged bad for you yesterday is likely to prove beneficial today.”

— Mordecai Richler

38. “All the same, it strikes me as unfair that I still have to defend myself against her moral judgements. My continuing need for her approbation is pathetic. Twice now I have stopped myself on the street to remonstrate with her, a crazy old coot talking to himself.”

— Mordecai Richler

39. “Obviously the raven with the unquenchable itch was at it again, playing tricks on the world and its creatures. Once by air, he thought, and now by water.”

— Mordecai Richler

40. “Shame on you. Don’t tell me you’ve been married for an hour and you’ve already got eyes for another woman.”

— Mordecai Richler

41. “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

42. “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

43. “I didn’t know about beauty, he had thought. Nobody ever told me.”

— Mordecai Richler

44. “I’m criticized by the feminists, by the Jewish establishment, by Canadian nationalists. And why not? I’ve had my pot shots at them. I’m fair game.”

— Mordecai Richler

45. “Damn damn damn.”

— Mordecai Richler

46. “Tomorrow country then, tomorrow country now.”

— Mordecai Richler

47. “In those olden times you didn’t have to be a space scientist to manage the gadget that flicked your TV on and off, that ridiculous thingamabob that now comes with twenty push buttons, God knows what for. Doctors made house calls. Rabbis were guys. Kids were raised by their moms instead of in child-care pens like piglets. Software meant haberdashery.”

— Mordecai Richler

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

— Mordecai Richler

49. “I’m rambling again. Wandering off the point. But this is the true story of my wasted life...”

— Mordecai Richler

50. “One final thought. In the years leading up to my trial, whenever I was caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the highway leading to my cottage, creeping along behind a battered, rust eaten pick-up truck with a sticker on its rear bumper that read JESUS SAVES, I used to think don’t count on it, buster. Now I am no longer sure.”

— Mordecai Richler