Richard Flanagan
Richard Flanagan
Richard Miller Flanaganis an Australian novelist from Tasmania. "Considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation", according to The Economist, each of his novels has attracted major praise and received numerous awards and honours. He also has written and directed feature films. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
CountryAustralia
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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.
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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.
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One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.
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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.
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A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.
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In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.
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In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.
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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.
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I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.
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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.
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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.
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Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age - perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent - who painted them, what they mean.
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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.