Nick Flynn

“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 tr...”

“If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper might have used the word massive, as if a mountain range had opened inside her, but instead it used the word suddenly, a light coming on in an em...”

“The South African artist William Kentridge speaks to this type of certainty: 'To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then...”

“(2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on...”

“My statement to Harris that his book contains much to admire is specious hyperbole. In The End of Faith, Harris rails against religious fundamentalism, which seems obvious, as well as agains...”

“That Dick Cheney is pro-torture surprises no one; he freely admits it.”

“I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet was saying you were kind of crazy, and I ca...”

“To be honest, in my five years as an electrician, I never got the license.”

“For the first few months, I was a comically inept parent. The first night home from the hospital, I held her bare body against my bare chest until a friend who was a doctor came by and asked...”

“Our job as writers, as far as I can tell, is to attempt to express what seems inexpressible.”

“It takes an entire book to tell you what it was like. To see Robert De Niro play your father - it's not a simple answer. To see Julianne Moore play your mother. To see Paul Dano play you - t...”

“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 h...”

“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 tr...”

“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.”