Tom Perrotta Quotes

48 quotes in 900 categories

• Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.
• Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.
• It's like the human race has been programmed for misery.
• Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.
• She told her therapist it reminded her of coming home the summer after her freshman year at Rutgers, stepping back into the warm bath of…
• I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.
• I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.
• I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to…
• I was also known as Frodo because I was an early adopter of 'The Lord of the Rings.
• I write about kids growing up, I write a lot about schools and parents, and all of my experiences with those things have been suburban…
• I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.
• It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.
• My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.
• My wife and I left New York when she got pregnant - we just thought it would be really hard to stay in the city.
• When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.
• When things don't go well, it helps to think of yourself as a genius and the rest of the world as a bunch of idiots.
• As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.
• I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world…
• I have actual dreams of Bruce Springsteen calling me up on stage to wear a bandanna and play rhythm guitar next to Little Steven.
• I no longer believe that just about everything is funny, if viewed from the proper angle.

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