Words matter. These are the best Tom Perrotta Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I no longer believe that just about everything is funny, if viewed from the proper angle.
I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.
I think I’m fascinated by the power of religion in our culture. Like a lot of secular, liberal people, I ignored it for a long time. Lately, of course, just from a political perspective, it’s impossible to ignore.
I really wanted to be a musician, but it turned out I had no sense of time.
My wife and I left New York when she got pregnant – we just thought it would be really hard to stay in the city.
I was also known as Frodo because I was an early adopter of ‘The Lord of the Rings.’
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.
My mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don’t know them.
As for writing about temptation, there’s no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.
I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.
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.
I’ve been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.
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.
My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.
When I was writing ‘The Abstinence Teacher,’ I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.
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.
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.
