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
writing thinking should
I think writing should be about change.
jobs pain thinking
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.
fall thinking wish
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.
thinking empathy danger
I think empathy's a terrible danger for a writer.
grief writing thinking
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.
sex writing thinking
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.
common courage writers
In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.
man
In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.
darwinism demise mind offer proof seemed striking supposed truth victorian
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.
contain life love
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.
authority books creates grace lends life love missed moment people reader talk
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.
advanced change climate perhaps reminded saturday vulnerable
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.
age painted perhaps recent
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.