Richard Flanagan Quotes

Novelists can ask - they can ask for anything - but their books are their answers in advance.

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

I have written my whole life. I remember writing as a small child.

Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it well or badly. And merely because you've done it well once doesn't mean you can do it well again.

If I ever wrote a book, people would never believe it.

I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

I was one of those kids who always wrote.

Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.

If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.

I want to write more, because I think I've got a story to tell.

I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

Each novel is harder than its predecessor because I must work harder at not repeating myself. However, I enjoy the challenge. This is the greatest job in the world.

I've been writing, in one way or another, for as long as I can remember.

I still write the occasional short story, and poked at a novel once, but it's just not what I want to do.

I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say.

I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.

The most amazing gift about being a novelist is that you get to pursue your curiosity every day.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

I love to write. I have always loved writing. That was my first love.

I would like to write my biography sometime. I love to write. I could write for weeks and weeks, maybe say nothing but just for the writing.

Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do.

I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

I have written ever since I knew mechanically how to do it.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.