History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more. — 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
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
Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were… — 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
You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I'd have to take a year or two off… — 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
I love all forms of music. I even like music I dislike, because the music you dislike is like going to a… — 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
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 reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself. — 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
We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some… — 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
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
If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around 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
