Richard Flanagan

We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.

Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

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.

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.

In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.

There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.