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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

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Tom Perrotta
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: August 13
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Garwood
New Jersey
Life
Moment
Exactly
Piled
Like
Given
Choice
Obedient
People
Moments
Line
Pretending
Another
Sort
Adult
Littles
Lines
Fell
Little
Choices
Expected
Children
Society
Adults
Made
Actually
Weakness

More quotes by Tom Perrotta

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The interesting part about the writing process is that you can never see all the way to the end, not if something is happening over the course of a year and a half, or two years.
Tom Perrotta
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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 through their eyes.
Tom Perrotta
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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
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Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.
Tom Perrotta
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From a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.
Tom Perrotta
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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
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My wife and I left New York when she got pregnant - we just thought it would be really hard to stay in the city.
Tom Perrotta
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It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.
Tom Perrotta
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It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.
Tom Perrotta
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I know very few writers who outline fully before they start. It just doesn't seem possible to do, because so many things don't come out until you're absolutely knee-deep in the world.
Tom Perrotta
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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
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As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.
Tom Perrotta
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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
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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.
Tom Perrotta
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Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.
Tom Perrotta
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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
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I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.
Tom Perrotta
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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
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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 experiences.
Tom Perrotta
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I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.
Tom Perrotta