Tom Perrotta quotes - page 2

My mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn't to say that there aren't parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don't know them. (Tom Perrotta)

I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.

Tom Perrotta

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 go to the dump.

Tom Perrotta

It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.

Tom Perrotta

When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.

Tom Perrotta

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

Tom Perrotta

I did a lot of reading of the Bible and became fascinated with the idea of the Rapture. It's pretty wild. I hadn't heard of it until I was in college.

Tom Perrotta

I have actual dreams of Bruce Springsteen calling me up on stage to wear a bandanna and play rhythm guitar next to Little Steven.

Tom Perrotta

They both seemed to understand that describing it was beyond their powers, the gratitude that spreads through your body when a burden gets lifted, and the sense of homecoming that follows, when you suddenly remember what it feels like to be yourself.

Tom Perrotta

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they'd actually made some sort of choice.

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 God part, he would have happily attended church on a regular basis. (Tom Perrotta)

I was an English major in college, I went to a creative-writing program, and all my life, I really read and thought about fiction as a craft and an art form. I feel like I know a lot about it, and can trust my instincts.

Tom Perrotta

She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the quiet ones who'd sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing nothing except that they couldn't possibly be happy with any of the choices the world seemed to be offering them.

Tom Perrotta

To this day, she's still sad. Because there's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I'm just saying that I took the pain that was inside of her at that moment and made it my own. And it didn't hurt me at all.

Tom Perrotta

It's like the human race has been programmed for misery.

Tom Perrotta

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

Tom Perrotta

I think I was always writing books that had very clear scenic structures. I do tend to write in scenes. I do tend to have a fair amount of dialogue. And I do tend to use stories that don't sprawl all over the place, that have a very sharp focus in terms of how they unfold in time.

Tom Perrotta

I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called 'Pariah.' The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was 'Pariah.' It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote stories for them.

Tom Perrotta

Jill felt an emptiness open inside of her as she lifted her arm, a sense that something vital was being subtracted from her life. It was always like that when somebody you cared about went away, even when you knew it was inevitable, and it probably wasn't your fault.

Tom Perrotta

Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.

Tom Perrotta

Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer - that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with the people you'd left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn't love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb. (Tom Perrotta)

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

Tom Perrotta

A screenwriter heard me read from my novel 'The Wishbones' when it was still in progress and mentioned me to some producers in Hollywood. They called, and I told them I had a novel in my drawer about a high school election that goes haywire. They asked to take a look, and my life changed pretty dramatically as a result.

Tom Perrotta

He'd never had to make the adjustments and compromises other people accepted early in their romantic careers; never had a chance to learn the lesson that Sarah taught him everyday--that beauty was only a part of it, and not even the most important part, that there were transactions between people that occurred on some mysterious level beneath the skin, or maybe even beyond the body.

Tom Perrotta

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Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta - Image

Photo: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0

Occupation: American Novelist
Born: August 13, 1961
Quotes count: 49

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