Nick Flynn

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.

For years before I became a father, I would try to spend as much time as I could with my friends who were parents and their kids. And I was really impressed. They all sort of managed to do it, and do it gracefully.

I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.

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

When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.

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

The attention one gets from being a poet isn't great.

My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.

In life you get one take, and it's perfect.

I'm not sure why working at a homeless shelter made sense to me, except that I needed to immerse myself in some sort of larger real-life situation to get me out of the cage of my mind, in some ways.

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.

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.