129 Quotes by Tom Perrotta

Something that had possibly caused the distance between us, but might also bring us back together.

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 could spend the whole afternoon telling you about him, but it’s not gonna do much good, is it? You never smelled his hair after he just got out of the bath, or carried him from the car after he’d fallen asleep on the way home, or heard the way he laughed when someone tickled him. So you’ll just have to take my word for it: He was a great kid and he made you glad to be alive.

I got PTSD from high school.

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

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.

What a beautiful bird, they kept telling one another, which was a weird thing to say about a dead thing without a head.

My wife and I left New York when she got pregnant – we just thought it would be really hard to stay in the city.

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