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. – Richard Flanagan
I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself. – Richard Flanagan
The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century. – Richard Flanagan
Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet – in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius. – Richard Flanagan
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. – 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. – Richard Flanagan
The only accusation of Gillian Triggs with the ring of truth is that she has lost the confidence of the government – but then, so too has Tony Abbott. – Richard Flanagan
I grew up in a world that was clannish – old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families. – 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. – Richard Flanagan
I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate. – 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. – 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. – Richard Flanagan
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. – Richard Flanagan
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. – 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. – Richard Flanagan
My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died. – 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. – Richard Flanagan
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. – Richard Flanagan
After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn’t need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I’d much rather listen always. – Richard Flanagan
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. – 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. – Richard Flanagan
My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way. – Richard Flanagan
I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us. – Richard Flanagan
Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after. – Richard Flanagan
I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false – because hope is the nub of what we are. – Richard Flanagan
