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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent.

— Mordecai Richler

Wherever I travel I'm too late. The orgy has moved elsewhere.

— Mordecai Richler