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.
Richard Flanagan
Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.
Richard Flanagan
There is a crisis that is not political – an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness – and we’re completely unequal to dealing with it.
Richard Flanagan
Writing my novel ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North,’ I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I’d have to take a year or two off and find whatever menial labouring work you can get as a middle-aged, unskilled bald man.
Richard Flanagan
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
I get more optimistic as I get older.
Richard Flanagan
If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch – the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday – you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It’s always small, but it’s real.
Richard Flanagan
I do not come out of a literary tradition.
Richard Flanagan
I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.
Richard Flanagan
When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.
Richard Flanagan
I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
Richard Flanagan
Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself.
Richard Flanagan
My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever knew.
Richard Flanagan
I am an admirer of haiku, and I’m a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.
Richard Flanagan
I believe in the verb, not the noun – I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.
Richard Flanagan
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you’re writing, you’re writing nothing worth reading.
Richard Flanagan
I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.
Richard Flanagan
What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.
Richard Flanagan
In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.
Richard Flanagan
We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.
Richard Flanagan
A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.
Richard Flanagan
A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
I grew up in a world that was clannish – old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families.
Richard Flanagan
I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us.
Richard Flanagan
As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can’t be an act of filial duty.
Richard Flanagan
There’s always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government’s attitude to women.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
Of all the love stories ever published, I have – realistically – read very few.
Richard Flanagan
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.
Richard Flanagan
I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long – wisely, I felt – shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write.
Richard Flanagan