Philipp Meyer - Cornell changed my life; getting in there...

Cornell changed my life; getting in there was one of my pinnacle moments.

Biography

Author Profession: Writer

Nationality: American

Born: 1974

Links

Find on Amazon: Philipp Meyer

Cite this Page: Citation

Related Authors

Dr. Seuss, H. L. Mencken, Napoleon Hill, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ray Bradbury, William Arthur Ward, Dale Carnegie, Denis Waitley

Topics

Changed, Getting, Life, Moments, My Life, Pinnacle

Quotes to Explore

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

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

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