Quotes from Tom Perrotta

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

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 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'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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another?

Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.

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

Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.

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.

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 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.

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

She told her therapist it reminded her of coming home the summer after her freshman year at Rutgers, stepping back into the warm bath of family and friends, loving it for a week or two, and then feeling trapped, dying to return to school, missing her roommates and her cute new boyfriend, the classes and the parties and the giggly talks before bed, understanding for the first time that that was her real life now, that this , despite everything she'd ever loved about it, was finished for good.

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.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

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.