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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My parents have always been incredibly supportive. Even when I dropped out of high school, they said, 'We trust you, we believe in you.' "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When you take the fact that you're loved for granted, it frees your mind to go after every other thing there is. "

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

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

" 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. "

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