Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Flanagan
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: January 1
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Longford
Tasmania
Australia
Richard Miller Flanagan
Experience
Laugh
Agony
Character
Characters
Ecstasy
Tears
Shed
Outside
Onto
Laughing
Manner
Writer
Page
Stand
Suffer
Suffering
Pages

More quotes by Richard Flanagan

Image
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
Image
Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist.
Richard Flanagan
Image
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
Image
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.
Richard Flanagan
Image
You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.
Richard Flanagan
Image
The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.
Richard Flanagan
Image
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.
Richard Flanagan
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What reality was ever made by realists?
Richard Flanagan
Image
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.
Richard Flanagan
Image
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
Image
The monsters demand less of you as a writer because they're probably closer to who you are.
Richard Flanagan
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.
Richard Flanagan
Image
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
Image
I think empathy's a terrible danger for a writer.
Richard Flanagan