'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.
Richard Flanagan
We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion.
I do not come out of a literary tradition.
My secret skill is baking bread. My mother was a farmer's daughter and still made bread every day when I was a child. She would have me knead the dough when I got home from school.
In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.
If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour, it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast, it is a political question.
The past is there, but life is circular. I have a strong sense of the circularity of time.
A Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, who does believe in climate change, nevertheless advised her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, to abandon his emissions trading scheme.
In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.
Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.
John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.
We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.
Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.
The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century.
Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage.
If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It's always small, but it's real.
I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.
In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.
Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few.
I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.
My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.
I read incessantly, searching for the things that might move me.
I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.
I get more optimistic as I get older.
I hate the way my life has been inexplicably overwhelmed by questionnaires. Life is so much stranger and so much more beautiful than the lists that reduce it to an anorexic assembly of tics and obsessions.
I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false - because hope is the nub of what we are.
Yep, I often lit the barbie with old drafts.
I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.
You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I'd have to take a year or two off and find whatever menial labouring work you can get as a middle-aged, unskilled bald man.
If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other.
When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
I once knew a guy that everyone called Trodon because his face looked like it had been trod on.
After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.
I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.
Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.
I grew up very strongly with this sense of time being circular: that it constantly returned upon itself.
My father was the first to read in his family, and he said to me that words were the first beautiful thing he ever knew.
I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.
I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.
Family matters, friends matter, love matters. Those you love and who love you matter. That's what writing does - it allows you to say all those things.
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.
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.
What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.
A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.
A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.
There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it.
I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families.
I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us.
