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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

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I'm Criticized By The

Mordecai Richler

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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.

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I Had, Like Any Other Young Novelist, Started Out By Believing The Difficult Thing Was To Get Published And That, Once You Managed That, Well, Your Financial Problems Were Over. I Discovered, Like Any Other Serious Novelist, That Actually They Had Only Just Begun.

Financial Problems

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.

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.

A Novel May Take Anywhere From Two To Five Years To Write And, In The End, You Might Manage A Couple Of Thousand Dollars On It, No More.

The Revolution Eats Its Own. Capitalism Re-creates Itself.

I Must Speak The Truth, Even At The Risk Of Being Ostracized By My Fellow Scribblers. In Fact, Anticipating Their Rage, I Have Already Applied For A Place In The Canada Council's Witness-protection Program. This Because, Much As It Pains Me To Turn On My Kind, I Fear The Time Has Come To Admit That Far Too Many Celebrated Writers Were Outrageous Liars, Philanderers, Drunks, Druggies, Unsuitable Babysitters, Plagiarists, Psychopaths, Parasites, Cowards, Indifferent Dads Or Moms And Bad Credit Risks.

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.

A Boy Can Be Two, Three, Four Potential People, But A Man Is Only One. He Murders The Others.

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.

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.

Beauty, Like Male Ballet Dancers, Makes Some Men Afraid.

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.

Thousands Of Miles Of Wheat, Indifference, And Self- Apology.

Actually, When It Comes To Knocking The Canadian Cultural Scene, Nobody Outdoes Canadians, Myself Included. We Are Veritable Masters Of Self-deprecation.

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.

Canada Is One Of The Few Places Left Where The Small Decencies Are Observed. If, As A Young Man, I Was Scornful Of The Country Because We Always Seemed So Far Behind Style-setting New York, I Now Thank God For The Cultural Lag. Ours, After All, Is The Good Neighbourhood. A Society Well Worth Preserving.

Each Man Creates God In His Own Image.

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.

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.

If You Caricature Friends In Your First Novel They Will Be Upset, But If You Don't They Will Feel Betrayed.

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.

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.

Wherever I Travel I'm Too Late. The Orgy Has Moved Elsewhere.

Well, When I Was A Young Writer The People We Read Were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And To Begin With, I Was A Bit Of A Copycat Writer And Very Derivative And Tried To Write A Novel Using Their Voices, Really.... I Keep It Out Of Print.

In Canada, Nobody Is Ever Overthrown Because Nobody Gives A Damn.

Listen Your Lordship, I'm A Respecter Of Institutions. Even In Paris, I Remained A Canadian. I Puffed Hashish, But I Didn't Inhale.

And Furthermore Did You Know That Behind The Discovery Of America There Was A Jewish Financier?

Well, People Have Been Wondering What's Going To Happen To The Novel For Two Hundred Years; Its Death Has Been Announced Many Times. You Know, I Think The Novel Keeps Redefining The World We Live In. What You Should Look For In A Novel Is A Window Nobody Else Is Looking Out Of, That Nobody Else Can Look Through. What You Look For Is A Voice. You Pick Up A Novel By Someone Such As Faulkner Or Hemingway And You Just Read Three Pages And You Know Who Wrote It. And That's What One Should Demand Of A Novelist.

Edmonton Is Not The End Of The World But You Can Certainly See It From There.

I'm World-famous ... All Over Canada.

There Are Three Sides To Every Argument. Yours. The Other Guy's. And The Right Side.

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.

It Is No More Expected Of Most Producers To Read A Book Than It Is, Say, Of Ted Williams To Dust Off Home Plate.

The Process Hasn't Changed, But The Writer Has Developed. I Still Get Up Every Morning And Go To Work.

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.

In, 1950, At The Age, 19 I Dropped Out Of St. George William College In Montreal, As It Then Was, And Sailed For England On The Franconia. Foolishly, No Arrogantly, Believing I Could Put Canada And Its Picayune Problems Behind Me, Never Dreaming It Would Become The Raw Material Of Most Of My Fiction And Non-fiction. Or That I Would Care So Deeply About Its Surviving Intact.

So Far As One Can Generalize, The Most Graciouis, Cultivated, And Innovative People In This Country Are French Canadians. Certainly They Have Given Us The Most Exciting Politicians Of Our Time: Trudeau, Lévesque. Without Them, Canada Would Be An Exceedingly Boring And Greatly Diminished Place.

If You Don't Count Some Of Jehovah's Injunctions, There Are No Humorists In The Bible.

My Enduring Feeling About René Lévesque Is That If He Had Chosen To Hang Me, Even As He Tightened The Rope Round My Neck, He Would Have Complained About How Humiliating It Was For Him To Spring The Trapdoor. And Then, Once I Was Swinging In The Wind, He Would Blame My Ghost For Having Obliged Him To Murder, Thereby Imposing A Guilt Trip On A Sweet, Self-effacing, Downtrodden Francophone.

Tomorrow Country Then, Tomorrow Country Now.

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.

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.

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