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
love-is glimpse abandon
Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist.
giving-up survival path
The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.
forgiving experts notes
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.
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.
boats fleeing great large liberal malcolm numbers taken wretched
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.
book devote flattering happen life men movies problem whereas
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.
baking bread dough home secret skill
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.
death experience high japanese laborer low narrow points represents road slave
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.
family love
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.
change choose compass dismissed easily everyday hope power touch
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.
failure memoir
A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.
among ballot
Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage.
man pays unskilled work
An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.
terrifying
Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.