Tom Perrotta

“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.”

“Quite a metaphor. The person in the most pain wins. Does that mean I get a Blue Ribbon?”

“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 have actual dreams of Bruce Springsteen calling me up on stage to wear a bandanna and play rhythm guitar next to Little Steven.”

“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.”

“These days he was like a zombie, all grim business, just another jerk with an erection.”

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

“Laurie herself was more focused on the years when her kids were little, when she felt so necessary and purposeful, a battery all charged up with love. Every day she used it up and every night it got miraculously replenished. Nothing had ever been as good as that.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“That’s why we get involved with other people, right? Not just for their bodies, but for everything else, too – their dreams and their scars and their stories.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“Next time she’d have to ask him to keep the light on while he did it, so she could watch his face. That was the best part of the whole thing as far as she was concerned, the way a guy’s face contorted so violently and then relaxed, as if some terrible mystery had just been solved.”

“I’m only human, she told herself. There’s not enough room in my heart for everyone.”

“I was also known as Frodo because I was an early adopter of 'The Lord of the Rings.'”