Quotes from Richard Flanagan

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

I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.

'The Bradshaws' is the appropriately inappropriate English title given to an enigma - some hundreds of thousands of mysterious rock art paintings scattered through the wilds of the Kimberley, an area larger than Germany in the remote, scarcely populated northwest of Australia.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It's always small, but it's real.

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.

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.

In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.

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

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

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

I do not come out of a literary tradition.

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.

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.

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.

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