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" 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
Steel
Working
Up
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" 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
Us
Help
" Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better. "
Philipp Meyer
Nothing
Art
Better
" 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
Thoughts
Doing
Deep
" When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails. "
Philipp Meyer
Go
Rails
Off
" 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
Will
Halfway
Job
" 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
Political
Power
Moments
" 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
Woods
Alone
Book
" 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
Grades
War
School
" 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
Feel
Worry
Think
" Your mind burns a lot of calories. Writing can feel like a physical workout. "
Philipp Meyer
Workout
Mind
Writing
" 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
Sick
Street
Job
" 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
High School
Trust
You
" 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
Like
Me
Parents
" 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
Honey
Here
Texas
" 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
Texas
School
Literature
" 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
People
American
History
" I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get. "
Philipp Meyer
Begin
Close
Get
" 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
Believe
Job
Find
" 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
Ignore
People
Think
" What art and books do at their best is investigate why we are the way we are. "
Philipp Meyer
Investigate
Why
Way
" 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
Go
Your
" 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
Mind
Think
Relationship
" 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
Funny
New York
Country
" 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
Years
American
Work
" Cornell changed my life; getting in there was one of my pinnacle moments. "
Philipp Meyer
Moments
Changed
Life
" Since I quit banking, all my major life decisions, when they could, have revolved around writing. "
Philipp Meyer
Quit
Life
Decisions
" 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
Trauma
Bicycle
School
" 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
Family
Night
Working
" 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
Good
You
Work
" 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
Work
New York
Life