Mordecai Richler

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

I'm rambling again. Wandering off the point. But this is the true story of my wasted life...

...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.

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 truly good men I ever met.

Following the death of his wife, Sam Johnson wrote to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, "I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wilds of life, without any certain direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on a world to which I have little relation." But my wife wasn't dead, merely absent.

It seems to me that our lives are consumed by countless wasting years, but only a few shining moments. I missed mine. Yes is what I should have said. Of course I should have said yes.

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.

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.

Shame on you. Don't tell me you've been married for an hour and you've already got eyes for another woman.

If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn't to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island.

Fundamentally all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying about the brief flicker of time we have here and the frustrations that it creates.

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.

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

I work every day-or at least I force myself into my 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 get the fourth without it.

I work every day-or at least I force myself into my 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.

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.

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

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