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I think it's always wrong of writers to make too much of the pains of their labors, because most people have much worse jobs and suffer such indignities and hardships.

Richard Flanagan

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Richard Flanagan
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: January 1
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Longford
Tasmania
Australia
Richard Miller Flanagan
Jobs
Hardship
Much
Suffer
Make
Worse
Always
Writers
Indignities
Think
Labor
Indignity
Thinking
Suffering
Labors
People
Wrong
Hardships
Pain
Pains

More quotes by Richard Flanagan

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The monsters demand less of you as a writer because they're probably closer to who you are.
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What you're constantly seeking isn't a style, but a transparency between your soul and the words. And your soul is ever in flux, so therefore you have to constantly find new forms of words that might be able to register these changes in the soul.
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I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey.
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What reality was ever made by realists?
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Writing about sex at length is a bit like describing mastication at length. It's the causes and the consequences and the meaning of it that are interesting, not the anatomical descriptions.
Richard Flanagan
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It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.
Richard Flanagan
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The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or wonder or sorrow than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.
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We live in a material world, not a dramatic one.
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We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.
Richard Flanagan
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I do feel like a fraud a lot of the time because I've never been interested in people who say 'I'm a writer', 'I'm an artist'. Too much is made of the role and not enough of the work. We are such a celebrity-driven age and a status-driven age, that the status becomes more important than the actual work.
Richard Flanagan
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I think empathy's a terrible danger for a writer.
Richard Flanagan
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A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.
Richard Flanagan
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Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.
Richard Flanagan
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Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.
Richard Flanagan
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The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.
Richard Flanagan
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There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.
Richard Flanagan
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You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.
Richard Flanagan
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Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist.
Richard Flanagan
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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.
Richard Flanagan
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I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.
Richard Flanagan