A Quote by Richard Flanagan

I do feel like a fraud a lot of the time because I've never been interested in people who say 'I'm a writer', 'I'm an artist'. Too much is made of the role and not enough of the work. We are such a celebrity-driven age and a status-driven age, that the status becomes more important than the actual work.
Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.
I'm not the greediest person. Of course, I work in a business where that's all relative and there's a lot of money to be made. I think I'm satisfied making as much as I have and I don't feel particularly driven to have more.
I don't think my writing has much to do with my age. For me, my biography is more about what I was reading at what age. It's more of an intellectual thing of wanting to be free to write and think without being too bound by categorisation. I don't think I'm made for these times; I feel more like an old-fashioned writer.
People's perceptions of their status are just as important as their actual status.
I feel like a lot of people are very career-driven and there's pressure to be successful. You put off relationships. You put off those intimate relationships because you're just work-driven. It's a very sweet term, undateable.
Skating becomes more important to me every year. It's obviously harder as age takes a toll on the body and the brain, and I think because of that, competing becomes much more difficult. That's why those who stick around are always so appreciative of others' skating because we know how much work goes into it.
The mania started with insomnia and not eating and being driven, driven to find an apartment, driven to see everybody, driven to do New York, driven to never shut up.
It fails everybody, pretty much, the American Dream, but people are driven by it. I don't think we're driven by the same sense of hope in Europe. We're driven by pessimism more.
Being called a 'music legend' is a very funny thing. It's nice to know that my work has been appreciated and that people have given me that status. On a personal level, however, I can't think about it too much. It means a lot... but then it doesn't.
I am a writer who is definitely working with a specific language and more than English, that language is American. And I work very much in idiom and am very interested in the play of different kinds of rhetoric, whether it is the more high-flown stuff that reeks of age. I love to juxtapose something like that with something more current or urgent. I am always interested not in America by itself, but America as an idea and how that idea has changed over time, in the eyes of the rest of the world and in the eyes of Americans.
What I love most in life happens to be the very thing that I do day-to-day, as my work. What would be my hobby, you know, happens to be my actual job. So I'm very lucky. Even if I didn't want to do as much work as I do, I'd still feel compelled to, because I so longed to be a full-time artist, and since I've been given that opportunity, I'd never want to let down the gift.
I never feel age... If you have creative work you don't have age or time.
It's a small percentage of people who do the 80-hour-a-week high-powered career thing, and they're almost all men. Why? Well, men are driven by socio-economic status more than women.
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable.
My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.
Knowledge—like a nail—is made load-bearing by being driven in. If it's not driven deep enough, it will break when any weight is put upon it.
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