Nick Flynn Quotes

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.

When guys do books or stories, all I like to see is the truth.

Fiction lags after truth.

My books aren't autobiographical.

As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it's true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.

All autobiography is fiction.

I'm used to writing songs and songs-I can fill em up with symbolism and metaphors. When you write a book (Chronicles, Vol. 1), you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted.

I describe incidents which may or may not have happened but which are true.

It's as if we think the laws of physics are subject to debate and amendment and political contributions can sway the laws of physics.

Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.

The remarkable feature of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.

It does not say in the Bible that all laws of nature are expressible linearly!

Every fiction has its base in fact.

There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.

I shall speak facts; but some will say I deal in fiction.

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.

You can lie to your wife or your boss, but you cannot lie to your typewriter. Sooner or later you must reveal your true self in your pages.

Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.

Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking.

While there is such a thing as correctness in ethics, in interpretation, in mathematics, the way to understand that is not by trying to model it on the ways in which we get things right in physics.

Anybody who pretends to be objective isn't realistic.

- This isn't an interrogation or a trail. Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters. -Truth is singular. It's 'versions' are mistruths.