Philipp Meyer Quotes

23 quotes in 502 categories

• You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.
• No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth.
• The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge.…
• She wondered how people would remember her. She had not made enough to spread her wealth around like Carnegie, to erase any sins that had…
• Nothing prepares you for making art except making art.  You have to do it to get better.
• Since I quit banking, all my major life decisions, when they could, have revolved around writing.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• Your mind burns a lot of calories. Writing can feel like a physical workout.
• 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 try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get.
• 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…
• 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…
• I wanted to think about our creation myth; you know, what is the fundamental story that defines America. And it certainly is the West.
• 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…
• When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.
• Cornell changed my life; getting in there was one of my pinnacle moments.
• 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…
• Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live.

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