Richard Flanagan Quotes

A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.

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

Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.

What reality was ever made by realists?

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.

Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won't forgive you one false note about love, about which they too are expert.

I think empathy's a terrible danger for a writer.

It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.

The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.

I think it's always wrong of writers to make too much of the pains of their labors, because most people have much worse jobs and suffer such indignities and hardships.

I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.

I think writing should be about change.

The monsters demand less of you as a writer because they're probably closer to who you are.

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

I'm afraid a lot of people have lost a lot of money over the years betting on me.

Film is the art of turning money into light, and light into money. But it begins with money.

Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books.

One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.

The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.

We live in a material world, not a dramatic one.

In the end you're not made or broken by prizes. Your relationship is with your readers, not a prize, and you just have to keep on honoring that.

You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.

Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist.

Once upon a time...long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us.

What was a prisoner of war anyway? Less than a man, just material to be used to make the railway, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes.

Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises

-to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!

As they made their way to the coast, he bemoaned the hotel trade in the manner, Dorrigo felt, that those who love what they do bemoan their passion the most.

But what reality was ever made by realists?

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

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.

I am part of all that I have met.

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.

... being true to the multitudes within himself that are one and many.

The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.

Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

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.

The most important thing is our dignity. If we have that we can survive on bread and water.

A good book...leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.

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

'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.

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.