A biography for Richard Flanaganhasn’t been written yet.
“I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on.”
“Within white Australia, there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching in 2000 to demand the government say sorry for past injustices.”
“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.”
“What was a prisoner of war anyway? Less than a man, just material to be used to make the railway, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes.”
“A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.”
“The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic.”
“I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself.”
“You can spend a day in a library and feel: 'Great, I've done a day's work.' But it's only research, not writing.”
“My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.”
“I get more optimistic as I get older.”
“I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.”
“Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were.”
“I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families.”