66 Quotes by Philipp Meyer

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'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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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