Top 98 Quotes by Richard Flanagan

My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.

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.

I do not come out of a literary tradition.

The survival of extraordinary creatures such as the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish - the largest in the world - is in doubt because of logging.

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.

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.

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

I am the happiest writing and being with the people I love.

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.

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