Quotes from Richard Flanagan

And in the deepest recesses of his being, Dorrigo Evans understood that all his life had been a journeying to this point when he had for a moment flown into the sun and would now be journeying away from it forever after.

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.

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

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

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

A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.

Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.

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.

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

Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.

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

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 had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write.

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.

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

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

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

What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.

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

But what reality was ever made by realists?

All life is only allegory and the real story is not here...

It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.

I am part of all that I have met.