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" 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. "

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" 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

Find

Mind

Human

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

" Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Parents

" 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

Loved

Your

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

Philipp Meyer

Begin

Get

" What art and books do at their best is investigate why we are the way we are. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

Understand

Help

" Whenever I'm interested in something, I make sure I'm really good at it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "