Top 83 Philipp Meyer Quotes
#1. 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.
Philipp Meyer
#2. When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.
Philipp Meyer
#3. 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.
Philipp Meyer
#4. 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
#5. Your mind burns a lot of calories. Writing can feel like a physical workout.
Philipp Meyer
#6. I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get.
Philipp Meyer
#7. 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
#8. She knew why the Colonel had hated talking about the old days. Because the moment you looked back, and began to make your tally, you were done for.
Philipp Meyer
#9. 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.
Philipp Meyer
#10. 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
#11. I'd grown up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, a place hard hit by the offshoring of numerous heavy industries - steel, textile, shipbuilding.
Philipp Meyer
#12. 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.
Philipp Meyer
#13. 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.
Philipp Meyer
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. IT OCCURS TO me that we are entering an era in which the human ear will cease to distinguish sounds. Today I barely heard the drillers. What other things am I not hearing?
Philipp Meyer
#18. I can hear the Colonel - no land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth - but it does not make me feel any better.
Philipp Meyer
#19. We lie as if we are the first people on earth, or the last, the sun coming down on us, the water cold, our every action of the utmost importance, as if, like children, we know that no one else really exists.
Philipp Meyer
#20. If there is any question of whether it is better to love or be loved, the answer is obvious.....I would trade everything in this house, everything we own, to keep feeling this.
Philipp Meyer
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I went upstairs to my office. Lay in the dark among my books. The only comforting thing I have. An exile in my own house, my own family. Maybe in my own country.
Philipp Meyer
#24. It had become clear to me that the lives of the rich and famous were not so differ from the lies of the Comanches: you did what you pleased and answered to no one.
Philipp Meyer
#25. When is the army getting here?" "Never," he said. "Well . . . One riot, one Ranger." "Sure. Unless you're the one Ranger.
Philipp Meyer
#26. Of course she could not help but be drawn to people like Hank, people with their own fire, but no matter how much they thought they loved you or their family or their country, no matter how they pledged their allegiance, that fire always burned for them alone.
Philipp Meyer
#27. When I finish a book, I get extremely restless; I have to aggressively find ways to occupy myself; going off into the woods alone, doing things that are physically or mentally demanding to keep myself busy until the next big idea comes.
Philipp Meyer
#28. If a man has done it, so can you: that is what our father used to tell us.
Philipp Meyer
#29. 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
#30. Since I quit banking, all my major life decisions, when they could, have revolved around writing.
Philipp Meyer
#31. What we need is another great ice to come and sweep us all into the ocean. To give God a second chance.
Philipp Meyer
#32. At 16, I dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a Trauma Centre before ultimately deciding to go to university.
Philipp Meyer
#33. 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
#34. You could not measure yourself against the dead, they retained their perfection while your flesh got weaker and weaker.
Philipp Meyer
#35. Once people grew used to free money, to laboring only when the mood struck them, they began to think there was something low about work. They became desperate to excuse their own laziness.
Philipp Meyer
#36. 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
#37. I had never known there were so many people on earth.
Philipp Meyer
#38. Follow your footprints long enough and they will turn into those of a beast.
Philipp Meyer
#39. Cornell changed my life; getting in there was one of my pinnacle moments.
Philipp Meyer
#40. There is nothing wrong with my father: he is the natural. The problem is those like myself, who hoped we might rise from our instinctive state. Who hoped to go beyond our nature.
Philipp Meyer
#41. 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
#42. Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.
Philipp Meyer
#43. resacas have all gone dry. The entire earth, it seems, is being slowly transformed into
Philipp Meyer
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone's wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they're causing, and they will not stop until they've run the world economy off a cliff.
Philipp Meyer
#47. Everyone loves the underdog. Until they have to take his side.
Philipp Meyer
#48. But when I decided to move here, I found I had a choice between being liked and having a say. That's the choice you'll have to make as well. They will either love you and not respect you, or they will respect you and not love you.
Philipp Meyer
#49. You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.
Philipp Meyer
#50. No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth.
Philipp Meyer
#51. 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
#52. What art and books do at their best is investigate why we are the way we are.
Philipp Meyer
#53. Sometbing they have always done: call me by my name, as if disciplining a child. And yet I still feel compelled to answer them, as if despite decades of evidence to the contrary, I might explain my point of view.
Philipp Meyer
#54. 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
#55. 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
#57. 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.
Philipp Meyer
#58. 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.
Philipp Meyer
#59. 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
#60. People like him think you can apologize things away, that you can confess over and over until you are free to repeat your crime.
Philipp Meyer
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. I couldn't understand what was important about school. Dropping out was the first adult decision I made. If I ever have kids, I would hate for them to drop out. But I wasn't a rebel. I never cared to be against school. I just wanted to do what I wanted to do.
Philipp Meyer
#64. This is what it means to get old, you don't look forward to pleasure so much as easing pain.
Philipp Meyer
#65. On a horse he still looks like a young man; on the ground he carries the weight of all his years.
Philipp Meyer
#66. Perhaps another great ice will come and grind all this into dust. Leaving no trace of our existence, as even fire does.
Philipp Meyer
#67. 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
#68. It had been a turning point in her life, in some sense it's most important moment; she had seen the world and retreated.
Philipp Meyer
#69. 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
#70. All the things you needed to know in life - you didn't learn them until you'd already made your decisions.
Philipp Meyer
#71. Only bullets and walls make for honest neighbors.
Philipp Meyer
#72. Toshaway had been right: you had to love others more than you loved your own body, otherwise you would be destroyed, whether from the inside or out, it didn't matter. You could butcher and pillage but as long as you did it for people you loved, it never mattered.
Philipp Meyer
#73. When you take the fact that you're loved for granted, it frees your mind to go after every other thing there is.
Philipp Meyer
#74. When you hold things back, when you don't commit completely to your ideas and trust completely in your own instincts, you are guaranteeing your own failure - even if you end up having commercial success.
Philipp Meyer
#75. Of course you wanted your children to have it better than you had. But at what point was it not better at all?
Philipp Meyer
#76. Unlike the white, billions of whom shared the same handful of names, all interchangeable in the end, a Comanche name lived and died with a single person.
Philipp Meyer
#77. 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
#78. There was something particularly American about it--blaming yourself for bad luck--that resistance to seeing your life as affected by social forces, a tendency to attribute larger problems to individual behavior. The ugly reverse of the American Dream.
Philipp Meyer
#79. The strong took from the weak, only the weak believed otherwise.
Philipp Meyer
#80. 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
#81. Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live.
Philipp Meyer
#82. If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.
Philipp Meyer
#83. They could not seem to grasp that what mattered was what you did. Not what you said or thought about.
Philipp Meyer
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