Tom Perrotta Quotes

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

High school, you don't want to go back and do it over again.

I'm essentially a momma's boy with a good education.

High school was so much fun, and it wasn't a wreck at all.

I really wanted to go to high school and be normal.

I suppose that when I'm building a character, it's usually related to what their family is like and who their parents are, as well as how I grew up - that nurture side.

I was brought up as a normal kid.

My parents did their best - that earns a lot of forgiveness. But they say children grow up in spite of their parents, and I think I did.

I was the youngest of my entire family so you are tap-dancing to try to get the attention of your older cousins. I really hit my social stride in 6th grade, but before that I was a pretty big dork. You learn how to be amusing and how to work for it.

I have three older brothers, and each one of them has chosen one of my parents' education. Two of them are actors, and the third is a doctor as my mother is.

All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

High school isn't necessarily the best time of your life.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

I had a complicated life until I was 25. I was born in Bristol and was brought up by my mum and my stepfather in Edinburgh. He introduced me to books.

College is the reward for surviving high school. Most people have great fun stories from college and nightmare stories from high school.

I go to a regular school still, and I have the normal life of a regular kid.

I like writing about teenagers because it's a time of great change and conflict. Up to then, you accept what your parents tell you.

The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.

The thing about adolescence is that you are emerging from a state of obscurity. You are coming out into the world from your family. Your family can seem normal because it is your family and all you know, but in fact it is a mess.

My parents did a great job raising me and my two sisters. We all graduated from high school and we all graduated from college. So, to be a good representative of my family is probably my greatest accomplishment thus far.

Education, like neurosis, begins at home.

'True School' is one great big reminder. It's a reminder to everybody in that middle school bracket that was in school when playing hard to get was out.

There is an old saying that you're a product of your environment. Parents can only do so much when eight hours of the day is spent at school. As parents, we try to teach our kids to be respectful to others and teach them old values, but a lot of it is down to the schools.

I read a lot, very passionately, from the time I was very young, but it was a constant battle; my mother would more or less let me be, but with my father, I was always searching for a place where he wouldn't find me. Whenever he saw me reading, he would tell me to put the book down and go outside, act like a normal person.

Maybe if I ever come to write about my teens and adulthood - and I can't imagine I will - but if I do, then maybe I will want to say a bit more about the ways in which my parents' relationship with one another impacted on me in later years.