Richard Flanagan

“'The Bradshaws' is the appropriately inappropriate English title given to an enigma - some hundreds of thousands of mysterious rock art paintings scattered through the wilds of the Kimberley, an area larger than Germany in the remote, scarcely populated northwest of Australia.”

“Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.”

“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.”

“As they made their way to the coast, he bemoaned the hotel trade in the manner, Dorrigo felt, that those who love what they do bemoan their passion the most.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time.”

“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.”

“Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.”

“What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.”

“I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.”

“I do not come out of a literary tradition.”

“I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.”

“God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.”

“In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.”

“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.”

“In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.”

“In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.”

“My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever knew.”

“There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it.”