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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Believe In Yourself

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" My ideal is to write most of the day, then go running, find friends and socialise all evening; my mind recharges with human contact. "

" 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. "