Richard Flanagan

I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.

— 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

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

— Richard Flanagan

Within white Australia, there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching…

— Richard Flanagan

In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.

— Richard Flanagan

Murder and hate are as deeply buried in the human heart as love, perhaps more so, and in truth they're rather entwined,…

— Richard Flanagan

My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing…

— Richard Flanagan

I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families.

— Richard Flanagan

If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the…

— Richard Flanagan

The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimately…

— Richard Flanagan

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

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

— Richard Flanagan

My mother hoped I'd be a plumber.

— 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

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

— Richard Flanagan

I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.

— Richard Flanagan

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

— 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

“Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does…

— Richard Flanagan

“And in all his life around him, Darky Gardiner for the first time sensed his own death. He understood that all this…

— Richard Flanagan

“Refugees are not like you and me. They are you and me. That terrible river of the wretched and damned flowing through…

— Richard Flanagan

“Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans' earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in…

— Richard Flanagan

My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million…

— Richard Flanagan

The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything.…

— Richard Flanagan

What reality was ever made by realists?

— Richard Flanagan