Literary Birthday – 13 August – Tom Perrotta

Happy Birthday, Tom Perrotta, born 13 August 1961.

Seven Quotes

1. I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.
2. 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.
3. As for writing about temptation, there’s no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.
4. 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.
5. Things change all the time – abruptly, unpredictably, and often for no good reason. But knowing that didn’t do you that much good, apparently.
6. 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.
7. We read fiction to satisfy a more basic need—to imagine our way into other lives, to explore characters and situations that tell us something new about the world, and maybe about ourselves, or to remind us of something important that we may have forgotten.

Tom Perrotta is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of nine works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into Oscar-nominated films, and The Leftovers, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed HBO series.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tom_perrotta_2007.jpg

Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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