Writer Quotes by Richard Flanagan

As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.

— Richard Flanagan

When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.

— Richard Flanagan

What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the…

— 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

I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never…

— Richard Flanagan

“-to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history &…

— Richard Flanagan

A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all…

— Richard Flanagan

I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

“A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own…

— Richard Flanagan

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

A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters.…

— Richard Flanagan

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual…

— Richard Flanagan

I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you're fortunate enough to reach my…

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

Family matters, friends matter, love matters. Those you love and who love you matter. That's what writing does - it allows you…

— Richard Flanagan

I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because…

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

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

— Richard Flanagan

I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but…

— Richard Flanagan

In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.

— Richard Flanagan

“He believed books had an aura that protected him, that without one beside him he would die. He happily slept without women.…

— Richard Flanagan

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

— 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 think it's always wrong of writers to make too much of the pains of their labors, because most people have much…

— Richard Flanagan