Mordecai Richler Quotes

Now that I'm older, I understand that it's up to the individual to decide who they are or what they are.

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.

When we're growing up there are all sorts of people telling us what to do when really what we need is space to work out who to be.

What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?

On some level, we as human beings can be who we want to be.

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

I have always felt that I am the sum total of my parts.

I wanted to become me, totally me. The more me, the better. I instinctively knew this and I was right.

I needed to carve out my own place and find out what I was going to do.

To get what you want out of life, all you can really do is find out who you are, and do that.

You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost.

Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do.

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

I think that's one of the things that's missing in a lot of people's lives. That's finding out what works for you and doing that.

I don't even know who I am. All I know is that I am the sibling, daughter, sister, the friend of somebody, and I need to know who I am outside of that.

I think everybody can identify, you know, with this sort of struggle to decide for yourself who you are, you know, and what your place in life is.

I think between the ages of 15 and 32, don't worry about getting married, don't worry about settling down, don't worry about having a baby. Give birth to yourself.

You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.

I was a personality before I became a person.

As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.

I am increasingly an architect of self. I am free to will and choose. I can, through accepting my individuality... become more of my uniqueness, more of my potentiality.

The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.

The woman's personal identity is a vast undiscovered country -- with which Society has yet to acquaint itself, and by which it is yet to be revolutionized.

Women are always being tested ... but ultimately, each of us has to define who we are individually and then do the very best job we can to grow into it.