Quotes by Richard Flanagan

About Richard Flanagan:

Richard Miller Flanagan is an Australian novelist from Tasmania. "Considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation", according to The Economist, each of his novels has attracted major praise and received numerous awards and honours. He also has written and directed feature films. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

Richard Flanagan

I get more optimistic as I get older.

Richard Flanagan

I do not come out of a literary tradition.

Richard Flanagan

I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.

Richard Flanagan

I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on.

Richard Flanagan

Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.

Richard Flanagan

I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.

Richard Flanagan

I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.

Richard Flanagan

I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.

Richard Flanagan

A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.

Richard Flanagan

I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families.

Richard Flanagan

I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us.

Richard Flanagan

As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.

Richard Flanagan

Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage.

Richard Flanagan

A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.

Richard Flanagan

I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.

Richard Flanagan

In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.

Richard Flanagan

I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.

Richard Flanagan

In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.

Richard Flanagan

In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.

Richard Flanagan

Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.

Richard Flanagan

Author Bio

  • NameRichard Flanagan
  • Descriptionprize winning novelist from Tasmania
  • Born1961
  • CountryAustralia
  • ProfessionWriter; Journalist; Film Director; Novelist
  • AwardsCommonwealth Writers' Prize; Man Booker Prize