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 have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away.

Richard Flanagan

'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.

Richard Flanagan

I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.

Richard Flanagan

I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it.

Richard Flanagan

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.

Richard Flanagan

The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time.

Richard Flanagan

I hate the way my life has been inexplicably overwhelmed by questionnaires. Life is so much stranger and so much more beautiful than the lists that reduce it to an anorexic assembly of tics and obsessions.

Richard Flanagan

The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men in suits, whereas that doesn't happen in books. You just go and write, and then the book comes out.

Richard Flanagan

What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.

Richard Flanagan

I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself.

Richard Flanagan

The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic.

Richard Flanagan

I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write.

Richard Flanagan

Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few.

Richard Flanagan

I am the happiest writing and being with the people I love.

Richard Flanagan

If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other.

Richard Flanagan

I love all forms of music. I even like music I dislike, because the music you dislike is like going to a strange country, and it forces you to rethink everything and to appreciate its particular joys.

Richard Flanagan

We like love - we love love - but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it.

Richard Flanagan

We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.

Richard Flanagan

Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

Richard Flanagan

An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.

Richard Flanagan

You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I'd have to take a year or two off and find whatever menial labouring work you can get as a middle-aged, unskilled bald man.

Richard Flanagan

Author Bio

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