Richard Flanagan quotes:

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.

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.

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

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 Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.

Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.

If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other.

It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia.

Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world.

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

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.

My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.

For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the 'fair go.'

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.

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

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.

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.

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.

Since woodchipping began 32 years ago, Tasmanians have watched as one extraordinary place after another has been sacrificed. Beautiful places, holy places, lost not only to them, but forever.

My mother hoped I'd be a plumber.

I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.

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

History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.

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.

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

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.

I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.

I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.

What do the hieroglyphs tell us of what it was like to live under the lash, building the pyramids? Do we talk of that? Do we? No, we talk of the magnificence and majesty of the Egyptians. Of the Romans. Of Saint Petersburg, and nothing of the bones of the hundred thousand slaves that it is built on.

The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs.

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

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

-to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!

Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage.

Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

The new music, the bebop and modern jazz, wasn't music to him. It was choppy noise pretending to make music out of traffic jams.

I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.

I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey.

Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few.

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.

In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.

A Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, who does believe in climate change, nevertheless advised her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, to abandon his emissions trading scheme.

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.

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

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.

John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.

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.

The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan - Kevin07 - exceeded in its banality only by its success.

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

I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself.

I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it.

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.

The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles.

You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I'd have to take a year or two off and find whatever menial labouring work you can get as a middle-aged, unskilled bald man.

We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.

An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.

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.

I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.

I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.

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

As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.

I do not come out of a literary tradition.

In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.

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.

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.

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

I love all forms of music. I even like music I dislike, because the music you dislike is like going to a strange country, and it forces you to rethink everything and to appreciate its particular joys.

I get more optimistic as I get older.

A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.

I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.

Film is the art of turning money into light, and light into money. But it begins with money.

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.

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.

I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you're fortunate enough to reach my age, to still be writing, you have to be grateful, and I am. I've been lucky. For many years, all I've done is writing, and it's all I've ever wanted to do.

I think empathy's a terrible danger for a writer.

I think it's always wrong of writers to make too much of the pains of their labors, because most people have much worse jobs and suffer such indignities and hardships.

I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.

I think writing should be about change.

I'm afraid a lot of people have lost a lot of money over the years betting on me.

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.

Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.

It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.

Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books.

Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist.

Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.

Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won't forgive you one false note about love, about which they too are expert.

Murder and hate are as deeply buried in the human heart as love, perhaps more so, and in truth they're rather entwined, and if you tried to separate them, you'd be missing something important and human.

One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.

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.

The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.

The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or wonder or sorrow than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.

The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.

We live in a material world, not a dramatic one.

We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.

What reality was ever made by realists?

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.

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

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.

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one's words and one's soul.

You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.