Tom Perrotta

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

“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.”

“Eve still marveled on a daily basis at the speed with which her own life had changed. A year ago, she'd been lost and flailing, and now she was found. She wanted to call it a miracle, but it was simpler than that, and a lot more ordinary; she'd met a kind and decent man who loved her.”

“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 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 would probably have to say that reading fiction — those stories fill the space that other people might use religious stories for. The bulk of what I know about human life I’ve gotten from novels. And I think the thing about novels that make them important to the people who love them is that there’s always another perspective.”

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

“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.”

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

“Nora had been training herself not to think too much about her kids. Not because she wanted to forget them - not at all - but because she wanted to remember them more accurately. For the same reason, she tried not to look too often at old photographs or videos...After a while, these scraps hardened into a kind of official narrative that crowded out thousands of equally valid memories, shunting the losers to some cluttered basement storage area in her brain.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”