Richard Flanagan

“Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted.”

“A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.”

“When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.”

“... being true to the multitudes within himself that are one and many.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.”

“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.”

“I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Because courage, survival, love—all these things didn’t live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.”

“Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites.For the line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only. And of that colossal ruin, boundless and buried, the lone and level jungle stretched far away. Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass.”

“It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.”

“In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon as it was touched crumbled in his figures back into dust.”

“We like love - we love love - but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it.”

“A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.”