Richard Flanagan Quotes

If I write what my soul thinks it will be visible, and the words will be its body.

Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.

When I sit down to write a song, there is no filter. I'm not trying to write for anyone or anything specifically. It's just trying to capture a little piece of your soul - even if it's a really ugly part.

It is important to express oneself... provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.

I feel what I sing, and I sing what I feel. Really, that's all I can do.

I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.

Feelings or emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are at your deepest place.

Playing is just about feeling. Playing isn't necessarily about misery. Playing isn't necessarily about happiness. But it's just about letting yourself feel all those things that you have already on the inside of you, but you're all the time trying to push them aside because they don't make for polite conversation or something.

Art is the skin of the soul.

I've never been about just trying to do what works. I've been about trying to authentically express how I feel.

All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

Unless I am what I am and feel what I feel - as hard as I can and as honestly and truly as I can - then I am nothing. Let me feel guilty ... don't try to educate me ... don't protect me.

We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. ... Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you're living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies for just one minute.

The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul.

When a women speaks her truth, fires up her intention and feeling, stays tight with the instinctive nature, she is singing, she is living in the wild breath-stream of the soul.

The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate.

Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.

Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.

I just sing what I'm feeling at the time and hope my fans will like that and appreciate that.

Everybody wants to know about my style and how it came about. It's no big secret. It's the way I feel.

The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink.

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

I'll cry at the end of the day, not with fresh makeup.

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

The more room you give yourself to express your true thoughts and feelings, the more room there is for your wisdom to emerge.