Richard Flanagan Quotes

82 quotes in 952 categories

• The journey is long, the road is dark and frightening, but together we can reach our destination: the Tasmania of which we all dream, where…
• The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.
• A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.
• Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.
• There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.
• A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.
• The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never…
• Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so…
• We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who…
• Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.
• What reality was ever made by realists?
• I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false - because hope…
• Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.
• I get more optimistic as I get older.
• I do not come out of a literary tradition.
• I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.
• When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.
• God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
• I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on.
• I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.

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