Words matter. These are the best Philipp Meyer Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When you take the fact that you’re loved for granted, it frees your mind to go after every other thing there is.
Cornell changed my life; getting in there was one of my pinnacle moments.
I just assume that I’ll fail at something for several years – that I’ll try my hardest and still fail for several years. With writing, that turned out to be wrong. I tried my hardest and failed for about fifteen years.
I didn’t fit the typical profile of a trader. I was an English major working on a novel at night. Most everyone else was a maths or economics major; most everyone else had relatives or family in banking.
When people grow up in atmospheres of violence or atmospheres of poverty, they don’t normally use hi-falutin’ language to describe those things. They would describe some brutal event the same way we would describe getting a taxi or missing the bus.
If you’re always thinking about someone else’s work, about the tradition you’re working in, how can you possibly make anything good?
My parents have always been incredibly supportive. Even when I dropped out of high school, they said, ‘We trust you, we believe in you.’
I thought that I would have a huge literary novel coming out when I was, like, 29. I quit my banking job, and I was halfway through my second novel – and I will never publish it, because it’s very mediocre.
You have to believe in yourself and only trust your own vision and instincts. If I’d listened to what other people thought about my work in the first 10 years that I was a writer, I never would have made it to begin with.
Texas was mostly short-grass and tall-grass prairie when modern Europeans arrived here. It really was a land of milk and honey. But when they brought all these cattle onto these relatively small bits of land, and the cattle were allowed to graze freely, they essentially destroyed the prairie.
I should say that generally I’m a pretty happy person, but as soon as I’m done with a project, I’m usually not happy at all. I feel a little empty and strange. I begin to think about how I can get better, stretch more artistically and intellectually. My biggest worry is getting complacent.
My first published novel, ‘American Rust,’ took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.
Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live.
When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.
My ideal is to write most of the day, then go running, find friends and socialise all evening; my mind recharges with human contact.
I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get.
Your mind burns a lot of calories. Writing can feel like a physical workout.
At Cornell University, it was well known that after five years on Wall Street, you could expect to be making half a million a year in salary and bonus; after 10 years, you could expect a million or more. I had 60 grand of university debt, and my parents had no retirement. I needed that money.
When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.
I didn’t know much about Texas when I moved there for graduate school. In my first or second semester, I took a class in life and literature of the Southwest, and that’s where I first heard about these events along the border in 1915-1918, what Anglos called the Bandit Wars.
When we think of the myth of the settling of the West, this is our creation myth. But because we think of it as mythology, not as real people interacting with other real people, we ignore the cost of human lives and blood.
I wanted to think about our creation myth; you know, what is the fundamental story that defines America. And it certainly is the West.
Since I quit banking, all my major life decisions, when they could, have revolved around writing.
When you look at ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ the weakest moments are those in which Steinbeck is spouting a political idea directly at the reader. The book’s real power comes from its slower, broader movement.
I’m interested in getting deep into a person’s consciousness and doing so in ways in which the narrator is secondary to the character’s own thoughts.
If you’ve grown up with guns, the thought that someone might take them away makes your stomach churn. They make you feel safe. If you didn’t grow up with guns, if you don’t know how to use them, then the thought that someone else has them makes your stomach churn.
Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.
I like mechanical things; my first book was a mechanics guide – that was what my parents couldn’t pry away from me; that was the blanket.
When I dropped out of high school at age 16, I didn’t know I was going to become a writer – I just knew I’d never been happy in school, and I had this strong suspicion I’d be happy doing other things.
What art and books do at their best is investigate why we are the way we are.
