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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
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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. "
Philipp Meyer
Years
American
Work
" 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
Decision
Choice
I Am
" Your mind burns a lot of calories. Writing can feel like a physical workout. "
Philipp Meyer
Workout
Mind
Writing
" 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
" 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
Work
Vision
Believe In Yourself
" When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails. "
Philipp Meyer
Go
Rails
Off
" 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
" 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
" Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better. "
Philipp Meyer
Nothing
Art
Better
" 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
Strong
Age
Be Happy
" 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
" 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
" 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
You
Street
Retirement
" 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 try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get. "
Philipp Meyer
Begin
Close
Get
" 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
Book
Political
Choices
" 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
" 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
School
Rebel
Important
" 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
" 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
" 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
Fail
Writing
Years
" 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
" 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
Violence
Way
Language
" 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
" Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live. "
Philipp Meyer
Time
Live
Family
" 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
" 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
" Whenever I'm interested in something, I make sure I'm really good at it. "
Philipp Meyer
Sure
Good
Make
" 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
" 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