Philipp Meyer Quotes
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I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get.
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Maybe all people with minds like Isaac's were the same. She knew he would make a much larger contribution than she ever would - he cared only about things much bigger than his own life. Ideas, truths, the reasons things were. As if he himself, his own existence, was somehow incidental.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You have to save yourself before you can save anyone else.
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Whenever I'm interested in something, I make sure I'm really good at it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?
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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.
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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.
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I wonder if I am going crazy or if I do not love my family enough, or if it is the opposite, if I love them too much. If I am the only sane person I know.
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When you take the fact that you're loved for granted, it frees your mind to go after every other thing there is.
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When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.
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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.
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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.
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What art and books do at their best is investigate why we are the way we are.
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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.
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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.