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I think empathy's a terrible danger for a writer.

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
Empathy
Danger
Writer
Terrible
Think
Thinking

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.
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The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.
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A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.
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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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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
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I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you're fortunate enough to reach my age, to still be writing, you have to be grateful, and I am. I've been lucky. For many years, all I've done is writing, and it's all I've ever wanted to do.
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.
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The monsters demand less of you as a writer because they're probably closer to who you are.
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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The journey is long, the road is dark and frightening, but together we can reach our destination: the Tasmania of which we all dream, where all are welcome and all prosper, made no longer of lies but truth, built not of rich men's hate but our love for our island and for each other.
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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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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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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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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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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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?
Richard Flanagan