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

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels a...

Richard Flanagan

Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites. For the line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was on longing for meaning and hope, but th...

Richard Flanagan

The new music, the bebop and modern jazz, wasn't music to him. It was choppy noise pretending to make music out of traffic jams.

Richard Flanagan

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

Richard Flanagan

Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it’s seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don’t share that pessimism because I think it is one...

Richard Flanagan

My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.

Richard Flanagan

A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.

Richard Flanagan

My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever knew.

Richard Flanagan

Family matters, friends matter, love matters. Those you love and who love you matter. That's what writing does - it allows you to say all those things.

Richard Flanagan

Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.

Richard Flanagan

In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.

Richard Flanagan

In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.

Richard Flanagan

Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted.

Richard Flanagan

Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world.

Richard Flanagan

The only accusation of Gillian Triggs with the ring of truth is that she has lost the confidence of the government - but then, so too has Tony Abbott.

Richard Flanagan

Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost.

Richard Flanagan

Within white Australia, there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching in 2000 to demand the government say sorry for past injustices.

Richard Flanagan

My secret skill is baking bread. My mother was a farmer's daughter and still made bread every day when I was a child. She would have me knead the dough when I got home from school.

Richard Flanagan

I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false - because hope is the nub of what we are.

Richard Flanagan

I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.

Richard Flanagan

History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.

Richard Flanagan

Author Bio

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