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
reality realist made
What reality was ever made by realists?
spiritual mirrors expression
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.
dream lying hate
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.
artist people important
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.
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.
world dramatic material-world
We live in a material world, not a dramatic one.
lying writing journey
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 form force
You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.
writing thinking should
I think writing should be about change.
soul style might
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.
broken our-relationship ends
In the end you're not made or broken by prizes. Your relationship is with your readers, not a prize, and you just have to keep on honoring that.
purpose horror imagine
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.
sex writing interesting
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.