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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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Tom Perrotta
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: August 13
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Garwood
New Jersey
Eye
Inhabiting
Two
Distinguish
Character
Sympathy
Together
Honesty
Writing
Characters
Really
Interested
World
Seeing
Eyes

More quotes by 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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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 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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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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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 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
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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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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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As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.
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 find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.
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 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 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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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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My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.
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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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