Top 75 Richard Flanagan Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic.

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.

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

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

What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity – Britishness.

‘The Bradshaws’ is the appropriately inappropriate English title given to an enigma – some hundreds of thousands of mysterious rock art paintings scattered through the wilds of the Kimberley, an area larger than Germany in the remote, scarcely populated northwest of Australia.

The only accusation of Gillian Triggs with the ring of truth is that she has lost the confidence of the government – but then, so too has Tony Abbott.

The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time.

After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn’t need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I’d much rather listen always.

I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.

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

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

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

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.

I believe in the verb, not the noun – I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.

I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false – because hope is the nub of what we are.

War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.

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.

We like love – we love love – but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it.

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.

The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men in suits, whereas that doesn’t happen in books. You just go and write, and then the book comes out.

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

When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.

My mother hoped I’d be a plumber.

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.

If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It’s almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other.

Family matters, friends matter, love matters. Those you love and who love you matter. That’s what writing does – it allows you to say all those things.

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

I think if ‘The Narrow Road To The Deep North’ is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.

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

I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it.

Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost.

As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can’t be an act of filial duty.

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.

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

A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.

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 been easy.

My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.

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.

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

Of all the love stories ever published, I have – realistically – read very few.

Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet – in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.

I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on.

We’re a migrant nation made up of people who’ve been torn out of other worlds, and you’d think we would have some compassion.

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.

Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.

I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself.

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.

If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast, it is a political question.

I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.

I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.

Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.

I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you’re writing, you’re writing nothing worth reading.

The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan – Kevin07 – exceeded in its banality only by its success.

We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.

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.

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.

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

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.

A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.