I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading. — 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
Family matters, friends matter, love matters. Those you love and who love you matter. That's what writing does - it allows you… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
The monsters demand less of you as a writer because they're probably closer to who you are. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked. — 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
I do feel like a fraud a lot of the time because I've never been interested in people who say 'I'm a… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Writing about sex at length is a bit like describing mastication at length. It's the causes and the consequences and the meaning… — 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
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 had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you're fortunate enough to reach my… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 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
