Philipp Meyer quotes

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. (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.

Philipp Meyer

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

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 attached to her name, she had failed, she had not reached the golden bough. The liberals would cheer her to death. They would light marijuana cigarettes and drive to their sushi restaurants and eat fresh food that had traveled eight thousand miles. They would spend all of supper complaining about people like her, and when they got home their houses would be cold and they'd press a button on a wall to get warm. The whole time complaining about big oil.

Philipp Meyer

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

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

There's parts of me I don't understand, he said, and shrugged.

Philipp Meyer

There'd always been something about the boy, he was smart and stupid at the same time. As if he was meant to do everything the wrong way. Junior league ball, the boy was twelve, they subbed him in for the pitcher, good arm but he chokes, eight runs straight, loses the game. Afterward acting like nothing happened. It made no sense. The feeling that gave you, watching your son lose the game, but he just shrugged it off, didn't care.

Philipp Meyer

[Y]ou have to save yourself before you can save anyone else.

Philipp Meyer

To be a simple animal like my father, untroubled by consciousness, or conscience. To sleep soundly, at east with your certainties, men as expendable as beef.

Philipp Meyer

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. (Philipp Meyer)

What would I tell her? That I have always known I belonged here? That one day some action will be required that will prove my life's value? A forty-six-year-old man, waiting for fate to take over... it likely already has.

Philipp Meyer

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

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

Philipp Meyer

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

Philipp Meyer

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.

Philipp Meyer

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

Philipp Meyer

You have to believe in yourself and only trust your own vision and instincts. If Id 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