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
I like mechanical things; my first book was a mechanics guide - that was what my parents couldn't pry away from me; that was the blanket.
Your mind burns a lot of calories. Writing can feel like a physical workout.
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.
At Cornell University, it was well known that after five years on Wall Street, you could expect to be making half a million a year in salary and bonus; after 10 years, you could expect a million or more. I had 60 grand of university debt, and my parents had no retirement. I needed that money.
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.
When I dropped out of high school at age 16, I didn't know I was going to become a writer - I just knew I'd never been happy in school, and I had this strong suspicion I'd be happy doing other things.
Cornell changed my life; getting in there was one of my pinnacle moments.
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.
Whenever I'm interested in something, I make sure I'm really good at it.
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.
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.
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.
When you take the fact that you're loved for granted, it frees your mind to go after every other thing there is.
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, not as real people interacting with other real people, we ignore the cost of human lives and blood.