Best 64 quotes of Richard Flanagan on MyQuotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you're fortunate enough to reach my age, to still be writing, you have to be grateful, and I am. I've been lucky. For many years, all I've done is writing, and it's all I've ever wanted to do.

I'm afraid a lot of people have lost a lot of money over the years betting on me.

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.

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

I think it's always wrong of writers to make too much of the pains of their labors, because most people have much worse jobs and suffer such indignities and hardships.

I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey.

I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.

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.

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

Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.

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

Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won't forgive you one false note about love, about which they too are expert.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

We live in a material world, not a dramatic one.

We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.

What reality was ever made by realists?

What you're constantly seeking isn't a style, but a transparency between your soul and the words. And your soul is ever in flux, so therefore you have to constantly find new forms of words that might be able to register these changes in the soul.

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

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.

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

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.

And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space - was treated with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter - pleasure, joy, friendship, loved - was deemed somehow peripheral.

And when I had finished painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go round as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?

Because courage, survival, love—all these things didn’t live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.

… behind which the panting dog drooped like a dropped chamois. It was too hot to smoke, but he smoked his pipe anyway. The smoke wreathed a strange smile that Dorrigo later came to realise was fixed; determined to find the world cheery in spite of all the evidence life produced to the contrary.

... being true to the multitudes within himself that are one and many.

Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites. For the line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only. And of that colossal ruin, boundless and buried, the lone and level jungle stretched far away. Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass.

for a moment he wondered:what if this had all been a mask for the most terrible evil? The idea was too horrific to hold on to.

He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more than the reading of poetry; where excitement would come from paying for a soup made out of foraged grass. He had eaten soup made out of foraged grass in the camps; he preferred food.

In Australia the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle. I just didn’t expect to end up with the chicken.

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon as it was touched crumbled in his figures back into dust.

Miłość to za skromne słowo, nie uważa pan? Mam przyjaciółkę w Fern Tree, która uczy gry na fortepianie. Ona jest bardzo muzykalna, a mnie słoń na ucho nadepnął. Ale pewnego dnia ta przyjaciółka powiedziała mi, że każdy pokój ma swoją nutę. Trzeba ją tylko znaleźć. Zaczęła przebierać palcami po klawiszach, tam i z powrotem, i nagle jedna nuta powróciła do nas, po prostu obiła się od ścian, uniosła nad podłogą i wypełniła cały pokój takim jakimś doskonałym pomrukiem. Pięknym dźwiękiem. Było to tak, jak gdyby rzucił pan śliwkę, a ona wróciła by do pana całym sadem. Nie uwierzyłby pan w to, panie Evans. To takie dwie kompletnie różne rzeczy, nuta i pokój, a jakoś się znalazły. Ten dźwięk brzmiał… dobrze. Nie mówię jak idiotka? Czy sądzi pan, że właśnie to mamy na myśli, mówiąc o miłości? Taką nutę, która do nas powraca? Która znajduje pana nawet wtedy, kiedy nie chce pan zostać odnaleziony? Że pewnego dnia znajduje pan kogoś, a potem wszystko czym ten człowiek jest, powraca do pana jakimś dziwnym pomrukiem? Który pasuje. Jest piękny. Nie potrafię dobrze wytłumaczyć, o co mi chodzi, prawda? Nie jestem zbyt elokwentna. Ale tacy właśnie byliśmy, Jack i ja. Właściwie się nie znaliśmy. Nie wiem, czy wszystko w nim mi się podobało. Pewnie miał w sobie coś, co mnie irytowało. Ale ja byłam tym pokojem, a on tą nutą, i teraz Jacka nie ma. I wszędzie panuje cisza.

Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.

Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it’s seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don’t share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.

Once upon a time...long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us.

One small boy jumps over a table, pulls his jumper and shirt up, and turns his back to us to show where shrapnel wounded him when he was three. His classmates shriek with laughter.