Richard Flanagan Quote

He remembered a joke he had heard in a Cairo café. A prophet in the middle of a desert tells a traveller who is dying of thirst that all he needs is water. There is no water, replies the traveller. Yes, the prophet agrees, but if there was you would not be thirsty and you would not die. So I will die, says the traveller. Not if you drink water, replies the prophet.

Richard Flanagan

He remembered a joke he had heard in a Cairo café. A prophet in the middle of a desert tells a traveller who is dying of thirst that all he needs is water. There is no water, replies the traveller. Yes, the prophet agrees, but if there was you would not be thirsty and you would not die. So I will die, says the traveller. Not if you drink water, replies the prophet.

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About Richard Flanagan

Richard Miller Flanagan (born 1961) is an Australian writer, who won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Question 7, making him the first writer in history to win both Britain's major fiction and non-fiction prizes.
Flanagan was described by the Washington Post as "one of our greatest living novelists".
"[C]onsidered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation", according to The Economist, the New York Review of Books described Flanagan as "among the most versatile writers in the English language".
He has also worked as a film director and screenwriter.