Nick Flynn
Flynn works across an unusually wide range of literary forms — poetry, fiction, memoir, short stories, playwriting, and screenwriting — and memoir is among the genres he has made most central to his writing life.
Born on January 26, 1960, in Scituate, Flynn is a United States citizen who went on to study at New York University. From that foundation he developed a practice that resists settling into a single category. He writes in English and has worked as a poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, playwright, and screenwriter — a list that reflects genuine range rather than occasional forays outside a home genre.
That body of work earned Flynn a Guggenheim Fellowship, a concrete marker of recognition from within the literary world. As a writer who moves between poetry, personal narrative, dramatic writing, and fiction, he continues to produce work across multiple forms.
Quotes by Nick Flynn
When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. 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.
I’m riding beside my best friend, and I tell him, in the same offhand tone my mother had used, That’s my grandfather’s funeral, and he looks at me as if I’m insane.
What I was trying to say, maybe, is that I don’t know what it is I’m capable of transforming into.
Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are more creative people prone to madness? They have more than average amounts of energies and abilities to see things in a fresh and original way – then because they also have depression, I think they’re more in touch with human suffering.
OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio’s genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.
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.
We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don’t. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone’s sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one’s around.