Philipp Meyer
Philipp Meyer
Philipp Meyeris an American fiction writer, and is the author of the novels American Rust and The Son, as well as short stories published in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Iowa Review, and Esquire UK. Meyer is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship. He grew up in Hampden, a blue-collar Baltimore, Maryland, neighborhood often featured in the films of John Waters. His mother is an artist; his father is an electrician turned college biology instructor. Meyer considers his major literary influences...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.
If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?
I wanted to think about our creation myth; you know, what is the fundamental story that defines America. And it certainly is the West.
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.
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.
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.
Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone's wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they're causing, and they will not stop until they've run the world economy off a cliff.
No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth.
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.
Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.