Richard Flanagan Quotations | Page 2

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.

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.

You can spend a day in a library and feel: 'Great, I've done a day's work.' But it's only research, not writing.

There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.

Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost.

What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.

We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion.

In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.

I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.

I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.