Mordecai Richler Quotes

To make anything successful, you need a good writer.

Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.

I don't see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers.

Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.

I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

So I had this problem -- work or starve. So I thought I'd combine the two and decided to become a writer.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, but the perpetual human predicament is that the answer soon poses its own problems.

The ability to solve problems or to create products that are valued within one or more cultural settings.

I've always thought that problem-solving is highly overrated and that problem creation is far more interesting.

When our goals are clearly defined and intelligently set, you have, in essence, taken a major step toward programming your left brain. That frees your right brain to be its creative best.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

There is no problem in human life that apprenticeship to Jesus cannot solve.

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

One does not consider style, because style is.

Things grew and lived in constant adversity, ingenious in solving problems of existence.

I have always thought of poetry as an act of celebration. Just by nature of writing a poem you are taking the time to dwell on whatever it is that you're writing about...you can be celebrating anger, you can be celebrating sorrow... you are spending the time to focus and observe and try to understand the various parts of being human.

An audience is pleasant if you have it, it is flattering and flattering is agreeable always, but if you have an audience the being an audience is their business, they are the audience you are the writer, let each attend to their own business.

Get up from your desk and wander outside occasionally. To be a good writer one needs to be a good observer, and there isn't a lot to be observed at desk level.

How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.

A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?

I only get writer's block about once a day.

Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water.

To me the greatest problem with humanity is that they don't know anything of meditation.

Writers are damned liars. Every single one of them.