'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.
From Richard Flanagan
My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.
Love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth of love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after.
War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.
Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.
Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few.
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.
I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.
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.
My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.
17 perspectives
7 perspectives
5 perspectives
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1 perspectives