I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write.
— Richard Flanagan
Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.
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.
Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.
As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.
There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it.
A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.
What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.
I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.
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.
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.
Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.
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.
When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.
I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.
I get more optimistic as I get older.
We like love - we love love - but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it.
War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.
'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.
The only accusation of Gillian Triggs with the ring of truth is that she has lost the confidence of the government - but then, so too has Tony Abbott.
I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us.
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.
We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.
I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.
Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.
I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.
I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself.
An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.
I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on.
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 do not come out of a literary tradition.
Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.
Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few.
Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after.
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.
There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.
I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families.
A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.
In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.
The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men in suits, whereas that doesn't happen in books. You just go and write, and then the book comes out.
I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.
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 love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
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.
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.
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.
