Tom Perrotta
When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Sympathy
I have actual dreams of Bruce Springsteen calling me up on stage to wear a bandanna and play rhythm guitar next to Little Steven.
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.
I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.
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.
I no longer believe that just about everything is funny, if viewed from the proper angle.
I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.
I really wanted to be a musician, but it turned out I had no sense of time.
I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.
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'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.
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 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 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.
It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.
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 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.
As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.
My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.
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.
I was also known as Frodo because I was an early adopter of 'The Lord of the Rings.'
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.
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.
I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.
Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.Collection: Thinking
He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.Collection: Book
They both seemed to understand that describing it was beyond their powers, the gratitude that spreads through your body when a burden gets lifted, and the sense of homecoming that follows, when you suddenly remember what it feels like to be yourself.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Children
It felt good, the whole family together on a sunny morning in a wholesome environment. If it hadn't been for the warshiping God part, he would have happily attended church on a regular basis.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: People
Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.Collection: Breakup
It's like the human race has been programmed for misery.Collection: Race
It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.Collection: Cheating
She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the quiet ones who'd sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing nothing except that they couldn't possibly be happy with any of the choices the world seemed to be offering them.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Hurt
Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.Collection: Broken
You could say that this book is ripped from the headlines, but that wouldn't be fair. Bret Anthony Johnston's riveting novel picks up where the tabloids leave off, and takes us places even the best journalism can't go. Remember Me Like This is a wise, moving, and troubling novel about family and identity, and a clear-eyed inventory of loss and redemption.Collection: Wise
Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.Collection: Forever
Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.Collection: People
Safe from the Neighbors is a novel of unusual richness and depth, one that's as wise about the small shocks within a marriage as it is about the troubled history of Mississippi. Steve Yarbrough is a formidably talented novelist, shuttling between the past and present with a grace that feels effortless.Collection: Wise
The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."Collection: Novelists
Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.Collection: Suffering
Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another?Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Arms
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.Collection: World
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.Collection: Book