Richard Flanagan

The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic.

I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.

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.

If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast, it is a political question.

Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.

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.

Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.

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

In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.

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.

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

A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.