Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books. — 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
A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all… — Richard Flanagan Books Copy Share Image
In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked. — 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 Imperial Copy Share Image
The monsters demand less of you as a writer because they're probably closer to who you are. — Richard Flanagan Monsters Copy Share Image
War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue… — 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
The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in… — 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
The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan - Kevin07 - exceeded in its banality only… — Richard Flanagan Australian 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 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
“Refugees are not like you and me. They are you and me. That terrible river of the wretched and damned flowing through… — Richard Flanagan Family 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 Age Copy Share Image
“He felt more soft raindrops, saw bright-red oil against the brown mud, heard his mother calling again, but it was unclear what… — Richard Flanagan Mother Copy Share Image
I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual… — Richard Flanagan Aesthetic Copy Share Image
“Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated… — Richard Flanagan Ageing Copy Share Image
“And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private… — Richard Flanagan Life Copy Share Image
The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything.… — Richard Flanagan Evil Copy Share Image
“Her eyes burnt like the blue in a gas flame. They were ferocious things. For some moments her eyes were all he… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
“...& she, armed with both & abandoning the joys of reason that had meant so much to her as well as me,… — Richard Flanagan Love Copy Share Image
In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children. — Richard Flanagan Aboriginal 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
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
What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself. — Richard Flanagan Being Copy Share Image
I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books. — Richard Flanagan Book Copy Share Image
My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more. — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel. — Richard Flanagan Books Copy Share Image
