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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.

Tom Perrotta

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Tom Perrotta
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: August 13
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Garwood
New Jersey
Books
Read
Book
Made
Think
Hadn
Thinking
Fully
Understood
Ones

More quotes by 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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I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.
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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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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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 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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My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.
Tom Perrotta
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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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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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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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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'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.
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
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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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It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.
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 find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.
Tom Perrotta
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I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.
Tom Perrotta
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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
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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