Nick Flynn
Nick Flynn
Nick Flynnis an American writer, playwright, and poet. His most recent publication is The Reenactments, which chronicles Flynn's experience during the making of Being Flynn, a film based on his acclaimed 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Flynn is also the author of three collections of poetry, including Some Ether, which won the inaugural PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry in 1999, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth26 January 1960
CountryUnited States of America
I'm not sure why working at a homeless shelter made sense to me, except that I needed to immerse myself in some sort of larger real-life situation to get me out of the cage of my mind, in some ways.
You come to realize people are not simple.
That Dick Cheney is pro-torture surprises no one; he freely admits it.
There's this sort of male energy that we have that can seem very destructive. But it doesn't have to be. It actually can be a very positive force.
The only strategy I know of is to write every day, which I don't always do, because sometimes I just can't, for various reasons that seem out of my control.
In life you get one take, and it's perfect.
To be honest, in my five years as an electrician, I never got the license.
Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way; you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth.
My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.
Our job as writers, as far as I can tell, is to attempt to express what seems inexpressible.
What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'
The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, 'The Magic Monkey' - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.