Top 137 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Flanagan - Page 2

A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.

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.

Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world.

Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

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

I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.

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

Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.

I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away.

In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.

Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.

I was struck by the way Europeans see history as something neatly linear. For me, it's not that; it's not some kind of straight railway.

Within white Australia, there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching in 2000 to demand the government say sorry for past injustices.

My mother hoped I'd be a plumber.

I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.

John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.

I am the happiest writing and being with the people I love.

I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.

The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century.

Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage.

Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.

My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.

The survival of extraordinary creatures such as the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish - the largest in the world - is in doubt because of logging.

In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.

Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted.

My secret skill is baking bread. My mother was a farmer's daughter and still made bread every day when I was a child. She would have me knead the dough when I got home from school.

Since woodchipping began 32 years ago, Tasmanians have watched as one extraordinary place after another has been sacrificed. Beautiful places, holy places, lost not only to them, but forever.

I love all forms of music. I even like music I dislike, because the music you dislike is like going to a strange country, and it forces you to rethink everything and to appreciate its particular joys.

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

Black Saturday reminded many Australians of what they know only too well: that of all the advanced economies, Australia is perhaps the one most vulnerable to climate change.

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

Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.

Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were.

A Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, who does believe in climate change, nevertheless advised her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, to abandon his emissions trading scheme.

It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia.

I hate the way my life has been inexplicably overwhelmed by questionnaires. Life is so much stranger and so much more beautiful than the lists that reduce it to an anorexic assembly of tics and obsessions.

Film is the art of turning money into light, and light into money. But it begins with money.

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 frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.

The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.

What reality was ever made by realists?

The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimately no purpose is a horror that's very hard to imagine, far less understand.

We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.

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 you tried to separate them, you'd be missing something important and human.

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

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 any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or wonder or sorrow than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.

It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

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 all are welcome and all prosper, made no longer of lies but truth, built not of rich men's hate but our love for our island and for each other.

I think writing should be about change.

A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.

Writing about sex at length is a bit like describing mastication at length. It's the causes and the consequences and the meaning of it that are interesting, not the anatomical descriptions.

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

I think empathy's a terrible danger for a writer.

The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.

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

Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist.