Richard Flanagan Quotes

There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative.

If you tell an amateur that his story is not good, he always declares indignantly: 'Oh, but it really happened just like this!' The writer who doesn't understand that this is beside the point is not a writer at all.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

My job is to tell a story, and the decisions about the casting have to be honest.

If the right idea comes up, and it feels true to talk about somebody being in a truck, and that's the only way to tell the story, then I will reluctantly tell the story that way.

A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.

I try to tell a story that's good enough to win the right to integrate eternal themes into it. If it's poorly written or comes across as a sermon, then obviously you don't reach people, because they're aware that you're imposing something on a story that isn't innate to it.

The mark of a writer is to make a story as likely as possible, and I've done my best to deliver authentic atmosphere.

This is not necessarily the answer people want, but ultimately, I think writing is an amoral process. Your ultimate responsibility is to the truth of the story you're trying to tell.

I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.

'Skins' is actually a part of who I am as a person, so I was really focused on making sure the scripts and the story lines were right.

Any narrative, whether it's fiction or not, you have to approach it as though it really happened to you. I think that's the only way to get inside the characters and make the narrative work. It's a storytelling tradition, and I think to come off as genuine then you have to really approach it that way.

I don't like family stories forcefully mixed with commercial elements.

The truth of the story lies in the details.

....we ain't doing civil rights here. We just telling stories like they really happen.

Everybody wants to feel that you're writing to a certain demographic because that's good business, but I've never done that ... I tried to write stories that would interest me. I'd say, what would I like to read?... I don't think you can do your best work if you're writing for somebody else, because you never know what that somebody else really thinks or wants.

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.

If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot. Observations must play second fiddle to integrity.

I feel with this film that as long as we tell Philomena's story and as long as we're true to her, which Jeff and Steve have already done by writing the story... we must not sell her short;. She's a most remarkable woman and all my concern was that we must be absolutely true to her story.

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

I like to think that one of things I've done with non-fiction since the very beginning is to find new ways of telling true stories.

In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.

You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!