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
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.
The attention one gets from being a poet isnt great.
I get inspired by my friends, and if a friend is a writer, that is even deeper.
I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.
I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.
Change is one of the only constants in Buddhism; as meditation became the way I breathed in the days, this became apparent.
By the time I'm nine I know the world is a dangerous place. I've heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family. But no one is offering any clear information.
What you fear your whole life comes to pass. You end up living toward it, you spend your life running from it but your foot is nailed to the sidewalk. You circle around it until you wear yourself own.
There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under.
By the time I make my way to the border of Mauritania, to the edge of the Sahara, I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn't a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand before your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you.
Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?
I offer Emily half of my hit of acid- Love Saves the Day. It's my second or third time tripping, Emily's first, and she's understandably trepid. Awake all night, at one point I find her touching her reflection in a cruelly lit dorm bathroom, asking if she'll ever be the same. I kiss her then for the first time and whisper, No.
In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.
Water can be a symbol of purification, to stand naked before someone a sign of truth, of nothing to hide. - Nick Flynn