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Literary Birthday – 26 January – Nick Flynn
Happy Birthday, Nick Flynn, born 26 January 1960.
Five Quotes
- If you’re going to write about someone’s life, you don’t just use them for wallpaper. You have to honour and respect that life.
- 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 truth. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognisable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else — an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood — or it may be easier to blame the map you were given — folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print — but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.
- 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.
- 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.
- Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression.
Nick Flynn is an American writer, playwright, and poet. His memoir, The Reenactments
Source for photograph: Nick Flynn’s website
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: Literary Birthday Calendar
Posted on: 26th January 2014
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0 thoughts on “Literary Birthday – 26 January – Nick Flynn”
Nick Flynn, s 5 comments are just ‘so me’ I find it incredible that I’ve got to 77 before reading exactly how my life has been and is still proceeding. It is definitely time to get as much of it on ‘paper’ as possible!