Philipp Meyer Quotes

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.

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.

Toshaway had been right: you had to love others more than you loved your own body, otherwise you would be destroyed, whether from the inside or out, it didn't matter. You could butcher and pillage but as long as you did it for people you loved, it never mattered.

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.

If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.

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

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.

The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.

People made no sense to her. Men, with whom she had everything in common, did not want her around. Women, with whom she had nothing in common, smiled too much, laughed too loud, and mostly reminded her of small dogs, their lives lost in interior decorating and other people's outfits. There had never been a place for a person like her.

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.

I might be killed any day, by whites or hostile Indians, I might be run down by a grizzly or a pack of buffalo wolves, but I rarely did anything I didn't feel like doing, and maybe this was the main difference between the whites and the Comanches, which was the whites were willing to trade all their freedom to live longer and eat better, and the Comanches were not willing to trade any of it.

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

And one day...there would be no record, nothing left standing, to show that anything had ever been built in America. It was going to cause big problems, he didn't know how but he felt it. You could not have a country, not this big, that didn't make things for itself. There would be ramifications eventually.

The white people are crazy. They all want to be rich, same as we do, but they do not admit to themselves that you only get rich by taking things from other people. They think that if you do not see the people you are stealing from, or if you do not know them, or if they do not look like you, it is not really stealing.

Only bullets and walls make for honest neighbors.

I had never known there were so many people on earth.

But when I decided to move here, I found I had a choice between being liked and having a say. That's the choice you'll have to make as well. They will either love you and not respect you, or they will respect you and not love you.

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.

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.

I thought that I would have a huge literary novel coming out when I was, like, 29. I quit my banking job, and I was halfway through my second novel - and I will never publish it, because it's very mediocre.

But of course they hadn't done anything. They'd all be born to the right parents, in the right neighborhoods, they went to the right schools, had all the right social instructions, taken all the right tests. There was simply not a chance they would fail. They'd worked hard but always with the expectation they would get what they wanted- the world had never shown them anything different. Very few of them had earned their places. Everyone admtted how spoiled they were but underneadth, there was always the presumption that they deserved it.
Of course, she hadn't said word. She wished she had but she hadn't. It was easy now to look back and think these things, but at the time she'd wanted to fit in and go along with Bunny and think yes I deseve this happy life I'm living.

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.

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

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.

There is nothing wrong with my father: he is the natural. The problem is those like myself, who hoped we might rise from our instinctive state. Who hoped to go beyond our nature.

My brother began to cry out in his sleep; I started to shake him, then stopped. There wasn't any dream he could be having that would be as bad as waking up.

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

Unlike the white, billions of whom shared the same handful of names, all interchangeable in the end, a Comanche name lived and died with a single person.

It had been a turning point in her life, in some sense it's most important moment; she had seen the world and retreated.

Man today lives in a coffin of flesh. Hearing and seeing nothing. The Land and Law are perverted. The Good Book says I will gather you to Jerusalem to the furnace of my wrath. It says thou art the land that is not cleansed. I concur. We need a great fire that will sweep from ocean to ocean and I offer my oath that I will soak myself in kerosene if promised the fire would be allowed to burn.

One day a few houses appeared," said Toshaway. "Someone had been cutting the trees. Of course we did not mind, in the same way you would not mind if someone came into your family home, disposed of your belongings, and moved in their own family. But perhaps, I don't know. Perhaps white people are different. Perhaps a Texan, if someone stole his house, he would say: 'Oh, I have made a mistake, I have built this house, but I guess you like it also so you may have it, along with all this good land that feeds my family. I am but a kahuu, little mouse. Please allow me to tell you where my ancestors lie, so you may dig them up and plunder their graves.' Do you think that is what he would say, Tiehteti-taibo?"
That was my name. I shook my head.
"That's right," said Toshaway. "He would kill the men who had stolen his house. He would tell them, 'Itsa nu kahni. Now I will cut out your heart.

If a man has done it, so can you: that is what our father used to tell us.

If you hate me it is because I have morals.

Perhaps another great ice will come and grind all this into dust. Leaving no trace of our existence, as even fire does.

Same as what they taught you as a lifeguard- you have to save yourself before you can save anyone else.

You could not measure yourself against the dead, they retained their perfection while your flesh got weaker and weaker.

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

It is as my father says. Men are meant to be ruled. The poor man prefers to associate, in mind if not in body, with the rich and successful. He rarely allows himself to consider that his poverty and his neighbor's riches are inextricably linked, for this would require action, and it is easier for him to think of all the reasons he is superior to his other neighbors, who are just poorer than he is.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

Once people grew used to free money, to laboring only when the mood struck them, they began to think there was something low about work. They became desperate to excuse their own laziness.

could not be expected to part with them.

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

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.

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.

We lie as if we are the first people on earth, or the last, the sun coming down on us, the water cold, our every action of the utmost importance, as if, like children, we know that no one else really exists.

Of course she could not help but be drawn to people like Hank, people with their own fire, but no matter how much they thought they loved you or their family or their country, no matter how they pledged their allegiance, that fire always burned for them alone.

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.

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.

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

I went upstairs to my office. Lay in the dark among my books. The only comforting thing I have. An exile in my own house, my own family. Maybe in my own country.

Of course you wanted your children to have it better than you had. But at what point was it not better at all?

What we need is another great ice to come and sweep us all into the ocean. To give God a second chance.

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.

No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth.

If there is any question of whether it is better to love or be loved, the answer is obvious.....I would trade everything in this house, everything we own, to keep feeling this.

How are the Indians on cats?"
"I never saw one. Plenty of dogs, though."
"They eat the dogs, don't they?"
"That's the Shoshones," I said. "A dog or coyote is sacred to a Comanche. You would be cursed."
"But they do eat human beings occasionally?"
"That's the Tonkawas," I said.
"Never the Comanches."
"A Comanche who ate a man would be killed by the tribe immediately, because supposedly it becomes an addiction."
"Interesting," he said. He was scratching his chin. "And this Sun Dance they all talk about?"
"That's the Kiowas," I said. "We never did that.

I can hear the Colonel - no land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth - but it does not make me feel any better.

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

This is what it means to get old, you don't look forward to pleasure so much as easing pain.

It was like this all up and down the river and many of the young people, the way they accepted their lack of prospects, it was like watching sparks die in the night ... He didn't see how the country could survive like this in the long run; a stable society required stable jobs, there wasn't anything more to it than that.

People like him think you can apologize things away, that you can confess over and over until you are free to repeat your crime.

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.

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

And then...it wasn't just that we lost all those jobs, it was that people didn't have anything to be good at anymore. There's only so good you can be about pushing a mop or emptying a bedpan. We're trending backwards as a nation, probably for the first time in history, and it's not the kids with the green hair and bones through their noses. Personally I don't care for it, but those things are inevitable. The real problem is the average citizen does not have a job he can be good at. You lose that, you lose the country.

I have spent most of my life trying to figure out what goes on inside your mind," he said. "First I thought you were slow and then I thought you might be red. Finally it occurred to me that you are just a sentimentalist. You believe in the open range, the code, the nobility of the sufferin' cowpoke and the emptiness of bankers' hearts - all stuff you picked up from Zane Grey . . ." In fact I have not read Zane Grey, though I do not mind Wister, but explaining these distinctions to my brother is pointless.

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