QUOTES by Richard Flanagan
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
A Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, who does believe in climate change, nevertheless advised her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, to abandon his emissions trading scheme.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
The survival of extraordinary creatures such as the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish - the largest in the world - is in doubt because of logging.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the 'fair go.'
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
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.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan
The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan - Kevin07 - exceeded in its banality only by its success.
Quote by -Richard Flanagan