Quote

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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Tom Perrotta
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: August 13
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Garwood
New Jersey
Littles
Took
Little
Realize
Much
Needed
Life
Longer
People
Silence
Realizing
Words
Others
Negotiate

More quotes by 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 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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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 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 find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.
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 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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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'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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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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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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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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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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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
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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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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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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