Quotes from Richard Flanagan

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

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

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

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.

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

When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.

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.

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.

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.

Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age - perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent - who painted them, what they mean.

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

I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.

I hate the way my life has been inexplicably overwhelmed by questionnaires. Life is so much stranger and so much more beautiful than the lists that reduce it to an anorexic assembly of tics and obsessions.

I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away.

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.'