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.

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

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

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.

Everybody writes a book too many.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

English-speaking Canada, far from stifling Quebec, has acted...as a committed partner, a buffer, shielding its culture from the rest of an English-speaking continent that Quebecers perceive as a threatening force.

… superannuated bagmen

I did hold the language laws of Quebec up to ridicule because they are officious and ridiculous.

The truth is that we want nothing so much as to be American. I for one would rather that we chucked it all and joined the United States and stop defying the law of politics and geography…. The reality is that Canadians are Americans already without many of the advantages.

Nobody is sure what our culture is or whether we even have a national culture at all.

In South America governments are being overthrown all the time. In Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn. Also what the Canadian government does doesn’t really matter very much. We’re much more affected by what happens in Washington or Moscow, than what happens in Ottawa.

Quebec women are treated like sows.

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, Levesque. Without them, Canada would be an exceedingly boring and greatly diminished place

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

Canada is not so much a country as a continental suburb, where Little Leaguers govern ineffectually, desperate for American approval.

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.

Listen your Lordship, I'm a respecter of institutions. Even in Paris, I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish, but I didn't inhale.

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

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.