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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

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A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.
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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 sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.
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We live in a material world, not a dramatic one.
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Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.
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What reality was ever made by realists?
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The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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