Quotes from Richard Flanagan

The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time.

I was struck by the way Europeans see history as something neatly linear. For me, it's not that; it's not some kind of straight railway.

I get more optimistic as I get older.

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.

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

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

Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world.

John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.

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.

Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were.

You can spend a day in a library and feel: 'Great, I've done a day's work.' But it's only research, not writing.

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.

We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.