Tom Perrotta Quotes

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

There is a certain joy in telling a story, and it gives me great pleasure to be a part of the process from scratch and say it the way I want to.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

In every novel, I write about something - a place, an experience, an emotion - with which I'm intimately familiar, but it's also crucial to me that I take on challenges. If write only inside my comfort zone, I'll suffocate.

I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

I suppose I have an active imagination, and writing allows me to live it out.

Writing is much more satisfying on a certain level than acting ever was. Because you're not interpreting someone else's original idea, you can come up with your own.

For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.

The most amazing gift about being a novelist is that you get to pursue your curiosity every day.

Never forget that the truest luxury is imagination, and that being a writer gives you the leeway to exploit all of the imagination's curious intricacies, to be what you were, what you are, what you will be, and what everyone else is or was or will be, too.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.

If I had my druthers, I wouldn't have anyone's words in my script but my own, but if you want complete autonomy, just stick to novels.

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.

I prefer writing originals.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

I think one of the keys to better writing is releasing all of your ideas and to not be afraid. Dream big. This could be the greatest novel in the world you know.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

I started writing because I found I could spend more time in my own imagination by doing that than I could by reading.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

I tell the stories that are of interest to me.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.