Art & Creativity Quote by Mordecai Richler

Privilege, in Richler's hands, arrives wearing a sheepish grin. The line opens on a pastoral ideal - country house, huge library - then swerves into a problem so rarefied it becomes a punchline: not the cost of travel, not the strain of city life, but the anxiety of choosing which books deserve a spot in the suitcase. It's a joke, but not a cheap one. Richler is doing that novelist thing where he turns logistics into psychology: the library isn't decor, it's identity, and leaving it behind feels like leaving parts of the self in a different room.

The subtext is a quiet self-mockery about the writer's dependency on texts. "I never know what I am going to need" is framed like packing for weather, but the need is intellectual and emotional - books as tools, talismans, future selves waiting to be activated. It's also a sly nod to the novelist's superstition: creativity can be summoned if the right voices are within reach, as if a particular passage might rescue a stalled paragraph or a dreary evening.

Context matters. Richler, a Montreal writer with a long, complicated relationship to London, spent stretches in Britain before returning to Canada; London is both cultural magnet and winter refuge. The line captures a mid-to-late-20th-century literary cosmopolitanism where mobility is normal, but the private canon is heavy. Calling it "the only disadvantage" lands because it admits comfort while puncturing it: a small complaint that reveals an entire class of life, and a mind so book-fed it can't travel light.