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

— Mordecai Richler

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

...and then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart's desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate. Oh, yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what she's missing. No, don't.

— Mordecai Richler

And what if Miriam and I were never to be reconciled?

— Mordecai Richler

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

— Mordecai Richler

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 perfect men I ever met.

— Mordecai Richler

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

But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit.

— Mordecai Richler

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

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

— Mordecai Richler