Daily Inspiration Quote by Mordecai Richler

Richler is letting the mask slip on a tension every novelist understands: the seductive self-sufficiency of fiction versus the stubborn fact that life keeps happening off the page. The line is pitched as modest pragmatism, but it carries a sly hierarchy. Novels are the primary marriage; journalism is the affair that keeps him honest. “Obviously” does a lot of work there, policing the boundary so nobody mistakes his newspaper bylines for a capitulation to trend-chasing. He’s protecting the novelist’s prestige while insisting the side gig matters.

The subtext is less about workload than about oxygen. Journalism becomes a controlled re-entry into “the outside world,” a phrase that makes the novelist sound like a long-haul diver returning to the surface. It’s funny, slightly self-mocking, and a little damning: writing novels can turn reality into raw material, people into characters, arguments into plot. Reporting forces a different discipline - deadlines, facts, friction, the indignity of being corrected by events. “I take my journalism very seriously” is also a preemptive defense against the idea that journalism is merely research or publicity. He’s claiming citizenship in public life, not just the private empire of imagination.

Context matters with Richler because he was famously combative in the public square, willing to spar over nationalism, identity, and cultural pieties. Journalism, for him, wasn’t a break from novels so much as a sparring session that kept his prose sharp and his targets current. Between books, he didn’t just stretch his legs; he went looking for trouble, then brought the bruises back to the page.