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I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.

Tom Perrotta

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Tom Perrotta
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: August 13
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Garwood
New Jersey
Even
Ruts
Mental
Changes
Small
Find
Sometimes

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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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Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.
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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.
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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.
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Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.
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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.
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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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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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My wife and I left New York when she got pregnant - we just thought it would be really hard to stay in the city.
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As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.
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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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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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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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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 novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.
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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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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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.
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