A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
In the end you're not made or broken by prizes. Your relationship is with your readers, not a prize, and you just… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“He pulled out a book here and there, but what kept catching his attention were the diagonal tunnels of sunlight rolling in… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won't… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“He believed books had an aura that protected him, that without one beside him he would die. He happily slept without women.… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Within white Australia, there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching in 2000… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Murder and hate are as deeply buried in the human heart as love, perhaps more so, and in truth they're rather entwined, and if… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast,… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimately no purpose… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
