Tom Perrotta

“Eve still marveled on a daily basis at the speed with which her own life had changed. A year ago, she'd been…

— Tom Perrotta

“Not that they would, but if any of the other mothers had asked how it was that Sarah, of all people, had…

— Tom Perrotta

The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate…

— Tom Perrotta

“She knew exactly what was weighing him down: that helpless feeling that you were wasting your precious youth and it was your…

— Tom Perrotta

“... Because that's what privilege is-the license to treat other people like shit while still getting to believe that you're a good person.”

— Tom Perrotta

“I'd come to think of sex as this long dark tunnel that turns friends into strangers, strangers into friends.”

— Tom Perrotta

“No, it's just like when you're dead and you try to remember being alive, it'll be like thinking of winter on the…

— Tom Perrotta

“That’s why we get involved with other people, right? Not just for their bodies, but for everything else, too – their dreams…

— Tom Perrotta

It felt good, the whole family together on a sunny morning in a wholesome environment. If it hadn't been for the warshiping…

— Tom Perrotta

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

— Tom Perrotta

“He knew for a fact that it was possible to fall and just keep falling.”

— Tom Perrotta

“When your words are futile, you’re better off keeping them to yourself, or never even thinking them in the first place.”

— Tom Perrotta

If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.

— Tom Perrotta

“I’ve matured. I have a much higher tolerance for boredom.”

— Tom Perrotta

“a regimen of hardship and humiliation that at least offered you the dignity of feeling like your existence bore some sort of…

— Tom Perrotta

“Something that had possibly caused the distance between us, but might also bring us back together.”

— Tom Perrotta

“Actually, he hadn’t just complained; she’d come home from school one afternoon and found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak…

— Tom Perrotta

“Diane used to joke that I was getting in touch with my own inner asshole, but all I was really doing was…

— Tom Perrotta

I know very few writers who outline fully before they start. It just doesn't seem possible to do, because so many things…

— Tom Perrotta

“He could easily imagine what people would say if they could see him now: exactly the same thing they'd say if someone…

— Tom Perrotta

“Because it was just too creepy to consider the alternative: nothing changing at all, everything shrinking into the sad belated recognition that…

— Tom Perrotta

“Within a couple of weeks of starting the Ph.D. program, though, she discovered that she'd booked passage on a sinking ship. There…

— Tom Perrotta

I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred…

— Tom Perrotta

“I got PTSD from high school.”

— Tom Perrotta

“And of course they used her like a disposable object, without regret or apology, because that’s what privilege is—the license to treat…

— Tom Perrotta