Philipp Meyer Quotes - BrainyQuote

American - Writer Born: 1974

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.

Family Night Economics Relatives

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.

Work Believe In Yourself Trust You

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.

Small Honey Milk Land

Life throws up enough road blocks to keep you from writing; you can't be adding to them yourself by saying you can only write in one specific place. I'm in New York half the time and Texas half the time, and I work wherever - in my computer bag I have some foam ear plugs that I can put in.

Life Work Time You

You don't make a decision about being a writer. There was a point, aged 21, when it became clear that this is who I am. The choice is how good you are going to be at it and how hard you are going to work.

Work Good You I Am

Since I quit banking, all my major life decisions, when they could, have revolved around writing.

Life Writing Quit Decisions

We moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1979, when I was five. The funny thing is that, even though Baltimore had one of the top murder rates in the country in those days, I grew up hearing about how dangerous New York was.

Funny New Country Dangerous

I was a bit of a delinquent growing up, a very poor student - I nearly failed several grades before dropping out of high school and getting a G.E.D. But I still read a lot. Thrillers and war novels, mostly, along with the occasional literary novel from my parents' bookshelf.

War Parents School High School

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.

Work Three American Two

After I finished college, I got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, but after a couple years of it, I was calling in sick in order to work on my novel.

Work Job Sick Street

Top 10
Philipp Meyer
Quotes

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.

People Ignore Think Real

There's a reason that all societies and cultures and small bands of humans engage in myth-making. Fundamentally, it is to help us understand ourselves.

Understand Small Help Reason

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.

Job Never Will Thought

Your mind burns a lot of calories. Writing can feel like a physical workout.

Mind Feel Writing Your

My ideal is to write most of the day, then go running, find friends and socialise all evening; my mind recharges with human contact.

Day Mind Evening Friends

My parents have always been incredibly supportive. Even when I dropped out of high school, they said, 'We trust you, we believe in you.'

Trust You Believe Parents

I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get.

Writing I Can Try Get

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.

Life School Know Literature

If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?

Work Good You Thinking

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.

History You People Look

I wanted to think about our creation myth; you know, what is the fundamental story that defines America. And it certainly is the West.

You Think Know America

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.

Age Be Happy Happy School

I don't think you can be taught how to make art. You can be coached, but on a fundamental level you have to figure it out for yourself. You have to learn how your own mind works, figure out your own relationship to the art; you essentially have to invent it completely for yourself.

Art Relationship You Yourself

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.

Character Thoughts Deep Doing

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.

You Power Look Book

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.

You Believe Job Saying

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