Philipp Meyer

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”