Latest Richard Flanagan Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• The monsters demand less of you as a writer because they're probably closer to who you are.

  Richard Flanagan

  Who You Are

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• In the end you're not made or broken by prizes. Your relationship is with your readers, not a prize, and you just have to keep on honoring that.

  Richard Flanagan

  Broken, Our Relationship, Ends

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I'm afraid a lot of people have lost a lot of money over the years betting on me.

  Richard Flanagan

  Years, People, Lost

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• What you're constantly seeking isn't a style, but a transparency between your soul and the words. And your soul is ever in flux, so therefore you have to constantly find new forms of words that might be able to register these changes in the soul.

  Richard Flanagan

  Soul, Style, Might

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books.

  Richard Flanagan

  Book, Purpose, Discussion

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think writing should be about change.

  Richard Flanagan

  Writing, Thinking, Should

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.

  Richard Flanagan

  Writing, Form, Force

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Writing about sex at length is a bit like describing mastication at length. It's the causes and the consequences and the meaning of it that are interesting, not the anatomical descriptions.

  Richard Flanagan

  Sex, Writing, Interesting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey.

  Richard Flanagan

  Sex, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Richard Flanagan

  Forgiving, Experts, Notes

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Murder and hate are as deeply buried in the human heart as love, perhaps more so, and in truth they're rather entwined, and if you tried to separate them, you'd be missing something important and human.

  Richard Flanagan

  Hate, Heart, Missing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.

  Richard Flanagan

  Character, Agony, Laughing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think empathy's a terrible danger for a writer.

  Richard Flanagan

  Thinking, Empathy, Danger

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.

  Richard Flanagan

  Grief, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Richard Flanagan

  Sleep, Love Is, Scent

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Richard Flanagan

  Camels, Details, Stories

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• We live in a material world, not a dramatic one.

  Richard Flanagan

  World, Dramatic, Material World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think it's always wrong of writers to make too much of the pains of their labors, because most people have much worse jobs and suffer such indignities and hardships.

  Richard Flanagan

  Jobs, Pain, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you're fortunate enough to reach my age, to still be writing, you have to be grateful, and I am. I've been lucky. For many years, all I've done is writing, and it's all I've ever wanted to do.

  Richard Flanagan

  Jobs, Grateful, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.

  Richard Flanagan

  Fall, Thinking, Wish

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimately no purpose is a horror that's very hard to imagine, far less understand.

  Richard Flanagan

  Purpose, Horror, Imagine

  Source: www.guernicamag.com