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I always want to write something better than the last book.

Tracy Kidder

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Tracy Kidder
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: November 12
Writer
New York City
New York
John Tracy Kidder
Write
Better
Book
Writing
Something
Always
Lasts
Last

More quotes by Tracy Kidder

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You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.
Tracy Kidder
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I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.
Tracy Kidder
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When I select a topic, it's usually a commitment of two to three years of my life
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My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.
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At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.
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I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.
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I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.
Tracy Kidder
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Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.
Tracy Kidder
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If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don't like is bound to happen
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You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.
Tracy Kidder
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The only real nation is humanity
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Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.
Tracy Kidder
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When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.
Tracy Kidder
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I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.
Tracy Kidder
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What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives
Tracy Kidder
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If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.
Tracy Kidder
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Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.
Tracy Kidder
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The goofiness of radicals thinking they have to dress in Guatemalan peasant clothes. The poor don't want you to look like them. They want you to dress in a suit and go get them food and water. Comma.
Tracy Kidder
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In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.
Tracy Kidder
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The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression
Tracy Kidder