269 Quotes by Richard Flanagan

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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