Time & Perspective Quote by Mordecai Richler

Richler’s line lands like a shrug with teeth: the novelist as mortality accountant, tallying a life that keeps slipping off the page. Calling writing “fundamentally” about dying is less a grand theory than a refusal of the comforting alibi that books are mainly about plot, romance, politics, or “human nature.” Those are disguises. The engine under the hood is time running out.

The phrasing does sly work. “The brief flicker” turns existence into something half-electrical, half-cinematic: bright, unstable, easily extinguished. It’s not the stately “span” of a life; it’s a cheap lightbulb. That image also flatters the writer’s medium. If life is a flicker, writing is the attempt to slow the shutter speed, to catch what the eye can’t hold. And then Richler adds the kicker: “the frustration that it creates.” That’s the real subtext. Not noble sorrow, not spiritual acceptance, but irritation at the mismatch between how intensely we experience living and how quickly it vanishes.

Coming from Richler, a novelist steeped in Montreal’s tribal loyalties, hypocrisy, and social ambition, this isn’t abstract existentialism. It’s a cultural diagnosis. People build identities, feuds, and reputations as if permanence were owed to them; the comedy is that none of it can cash out against the final clock. Writing, for Richler, becomes both protest and confession: a way to argue with oblivion while admitting the argument can’t be won. The bitterness isn’t a flaw in the sentence. It’s the fuel.