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" You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I'd have to take a year or two off and find whatever menial labouring work you can get as a middle-aged, unskilled bald man. "

Richard Flanagan

Bald

Man

Successful

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" An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well. "

" My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died. "

" I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself. "

Richard Flanagan

Time

Very

" I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy. "

" I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on. "

" There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it. "

" I get more optimistic as I get older. "

Richard Flanagan

Get

Optimistic

" I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes. "

" When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books. "

" My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever knew. "

Richard Flanagan

Family

Father

" I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general. "

Richard Flanagan

Great

I Am

" I do not come out of a literary tradition. "

" 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. "

" A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others. "

" Within white Australia, there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching in 2000 to demand the government say sorry for past injustices. "

" God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions. "

Richard Flanagan

Stories

Mundane

" I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate. "

" If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It's always small, but it's real. "

" If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other. "

" I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false - because hope is the nub of what we are. "

" Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage. "

" After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always. "

" Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other. "

" Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts. "