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 was struck by the way Europeans see history as something neatly linear. For me, it's not that; it's not some kind of straight railway.

Richard Flanagan

The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan - Kevin07 - exceeded in its banality only by its success.

Richard Flanagan

I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.

Richard Flanagan

John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.

Richard Flanagan

Black Saturday reminded many Australians of what they know only too well: that of all the advanced economies, Australia is perhaps the one most vulnerable to climate change.

Richard Flanagan

A Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, who does believe in climate change, nevertheless advised her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, to abandon his emissions trading scheme.

Richard Flanagan

If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for th...

Richard Flanagan

It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia.

Richard Flanagan

I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.

Richard Flanagan

My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.

Richard Flanagan

Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.

Richard Flanagan

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

Richard Flanagan

I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.

Richard Flanagan

Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after.

Richard Flanagan

I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.

Richard Flanagan

Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.

Richard Flanagan

You can spend a day in a library and feel: 'Great, I've done a day's work.' But it's only research, not writing.

Richard Flanagan

Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were.

Richard Flanagan

Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.

Richard Flanagan

Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.

Richard Flanagan

For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the 'fair go.'

Richard Flanagan

Author Bio

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