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

My mother hoped I'd be a plumber.

Richard Flanagan

My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.

Richard Flanagan

There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it.

Richard Flanagan

The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles.

Richard Flanagan

The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century.

Richard Flanagan

The survival of extraordinary creatures such as the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish - the largest in the world - is in doubt because of logging.

Richard Flanagan

Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.

Richard Flanagan

When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.

Richard Flanagan

After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.

Richard Flanagan

We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion.

Richard Flanagan

What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.

Richard Flanagan

If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast, it is a political question.

Richard Flanagan

Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.

Richard Flanagan

In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.

Richard Flanagan

Since woodchipping began 32 years ago, Tasmanians have watched as one extraordinary place after another has been sacrificed. Beautiful places, holy places, lost not only to them, but forever.

Richard Flanagan

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

Richard Flanagan

In Australia the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle. I just didn’t expect to end up with the chicken.

Richard Flanagan

For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any god man worshiped, for it...

Richard Flanagan

It was a part he felt himself feeling his way into, and the longer it went on, the more the men around him confirmed him in his role. It was as if they were willing him into being, as though there had to be a Big Fella, and, having desperate need of ...

Richard Flanagan

All life is only allegory and the real story is not here...

Richard Flanagan

It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.

Richard Flanagan

Author Bio

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