Quote

Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it’s purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it’s going to fail.

Nick Flynn

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Nick Flynn
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: January 26
Memoirist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Scituate
Massachusetts
Seems
Universal
Explore
Might
Succeed
Truths
Self
Mystery
Larger
Ostensibly
Even
Failing
Ego
Autobiographical
Going
Seem
Genre
Dissolve
Much
Though
Driven
Mysteries
Actually
Fail
Memoir
Order
Deeper
Purely

More quotes by Nick Flynn

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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.
Nick Flynn
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In life you get one take, and it's perfect. It's strange, afterwards you might think I shouldn't have reacted that way, but that's the way you reacted. That's your take that's all you get.
Nick Flynn
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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.
Nick Flynn
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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.
Nick Flynn
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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.
Nick Flynn
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I get inspired by my friends, and if a friend is a writer, that is even deeper.
Nick Flynn
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The attention one gets from being a poet isnt great.
Nick Flynn
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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.
Nick Flynn
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Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are. It's not a matter of getting over anything we have to make the best of it.
Nick Flynn
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I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.
Nick Flynn
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Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink.
Nick Flynn
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Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it.
Nick Flynn
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If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life.
Nick Flynn
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inside us, a flower taken whole, a field built inside.
Nick Flynn
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Trinity Park lies directly across from the library, Trinity Church rising like a midieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers.
Nick Flynn
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Read as much as you can. Write only when you feel the inner need to do so. And don’t ever rush into print.
Nick Flynn
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Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.
Nick Flynn
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There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.
Nick Flynn
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Change is one of the only constants in Buddhism as meditation became the way I breathed in the days, this became apparent.
Nick Flynn
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I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.
Nick Flynn