My parents have always been incredibly supportive. Even when I dropped out of high school, they said, ‘We trust you, we believe in you.’ – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
I wanted to think about our creation myth; you know, what is the fundamental story that defines America. And it certainly is the West. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
Since I quit banking, all my major life decisions, when they could, have revolved around writing. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
Fundamentally, all art is about human beings. You’re always showing larger moral questions through the smaller moral, philosophical, or political choices through one character in the book. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
If you’re always thinking about someone else’s work, about the tradition you’re working in, how can you possibly make anything good? – Philipp Meyer
My ideal is to write most of the day, then go running, find friends and socialise all evening; my mind recharges with human contact. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
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. – Philipp Meyer
