Top 20 Tom Perrotta Quotes

I really wanted to be a musician, but it turned out I had no sense of time.

My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.

The few times I’ve tried to write original screenplays, it’s a difficult process because I just don’t feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

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

I did a lot of reading of the Bible and became fascinated with the idea of the Rapture. It’s pretty wild. I hadn’t heard of it until I was in college.

I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.

I no longer believe that just about everything is funny, if viewed from the proper angle.

When I was writing ‘The Abstinence Teacher,’ I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.

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.

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.

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 was also known as Frodo because I was an early adopter of ‘The Lord of the Rings.’

I’ve been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.

It just so happened that for most of my life I’ve lived in the suburbs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.