Top 35 Nick Flynn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Perhaps everyone has a story that could break your heart...”

— Nick Flynn

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

2. “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.”

— Nick Flynn

3. “That soldiers do terrible things during wartime should not surprise us.”

— Nick Flynn

4. “I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.”

— Nick Flynn

5. “Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink.”

— Nick Flynn

6. “Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough.”

— Nick Flynn

7. “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

8. “Who doesn’t want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?”

— Nick Flynn

9. “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

10. “I have plenty of places to go, but no place to be.”

— Nick Flynn

11. “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

12. “The attention one gets from being a poet isnt great.”

— Nick Flynn

13. “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

14. “I get inspired by my friends, and if a friend is a writer, that is even deeper.”

— Nick Flynn

15. “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

16. “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

17. “Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness.”

— Nick Flynn

18. “Water can be a symbol of purification, to stand naked before someone a sign of truth, of nothing to hide. – Nick Flynn.”

— Nick Flynn

19. “There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they’re going under.”

— Nick Flynn

20. “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.”

— Nick Flynn

21. “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 carried that around for a long time. I still kind of carry that. And I think it might be true, actually.”

— Nick Flynn

22. “Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some return, unknown and hungry. Only the dog remembers.”

— Nick Flynn

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “Change is one of the only constants in Buddhism; as meditation became the way I breathed in the days, this became apparent.”

— Nick Flynn

27. “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

28. “Trinity Park lies directly across from the library, Trinity Church rising like a midieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers.”

— Nick Flynn

29. “I’ve come to believe that the function of torture in our society is not about getting information, in spite of what we might want to believe. It is merely about power. It tells the world that there is now no limit to what we will do when we feel threatened.”

— Nick Flynn

30. “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.”

— Nick Flynn

31. “I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.”

— Nick Flynn

32. “When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family.”

— Nick Flynn

33. “On a good day I write, all day.”

— Nick Flynn

34. “What I was trying to say, maybe, is that I don’t know what it is I’m capable of transforming into.”

— Nick Flynn

35. “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

36. “Everything we do, I’d imagine, influences everything we will do.”

— Nick Flynn

37. “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.”

— Nick Flynn

38. “It’s the way I walk through the world, carrying that fear, that the beloved will go, will die, and that I will be the one to blame.”

— Nick Flynn