Quote

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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Tom Perrotta
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: August 13
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Garwood
New Jersey
Looks
Love
Think
Extinguish
Thinking
Spark
People
Sparks
Unhappiness
Maybe
Look

More quotes by Tom Perrotta

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As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.
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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.
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He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I was also known as Frodo because I was an early adopter of 'The Lord of the Rings.
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.
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I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.
Tom Perrotta
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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
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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.
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I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.
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My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.
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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.
Tom Perrotta