Richard Flanagan Quotes

Every story is different, so what is a detail in one might not be in something else. Diversity is something I embrace and love about my work.

I do not understand how on earth you can become a writer without seeing the world.

I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I've always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are.

We all have a lot of people inside us, yet we get to live only one life. Fiction lets us slip into someone else’s skin, so to speak. That’s why we read novels, and also why we write them - to experience more life, through imagination.

I've always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.

What I like about writing a stand alone novel is you're starting with a fresh world and fresh characters. Part of what I love about writing is that journey of discovery where it's all new to me as well.

Sri Lanka is a part of my background: it's not where I live, but it's what I want to explore. And I find it works very well to explore through fiction.

I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't.

One of the fantastic things about books, fiction or non-fiction, is the way they give you a chance to look into different lives.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

I think what's so attractive about acting is that you get to live several lifetimes in one.

I want to do a little bit of everything. I love sci-fi. I think it's more the characters that draw me towards things. I like strong women. I'm very interested in futuristic stuff, anything.

Nothing much interested me other than playing with language and telling stories and doing something with the wonders of the world around me.

Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.

I was born to travel and write verse.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

I write because I have always been curious about what it would feel like to be someone else, in a different situation. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring that.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

I think I became a writer because I used to write letters to my friends, and I used to love writing them. I loved the idea that you can put marks on a page and send it off, and two days later, someone laughs somewhere else in the world.

The strength of fiction is not in reading about yourself, but in reading about other people.