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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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Tom Perrotta
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: August 13
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Garwood
New Jersey
Littles
Persons
Person
Decade
Little
Obsessed
Without
Decades
Bits
Religious
Religion

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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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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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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.
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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 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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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.
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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.
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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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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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As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.
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I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.
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It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.
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