Zitat des Tages von Philipp Meyer:
You have to believe in yourself and only trust your own vision and instincts. If I'd 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.
Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.
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.
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.
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.
Your mind burns a lot of calories. Writing can feel like a physical workout.
What art and books do at their best is investigate why we are the way we are.
Since I quit banking, all my major life decisions, when they could, have revolved around writing.
When you take the fact that you're loved for granted, it frees your mind to go after every other thing there is.
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.
My ideal is to write most of the day, then go running, find friends and socialise all evening; my mind recharges with human contact.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.
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.
