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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.

Tracy Kidder

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Tracy Kidder
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: November 12
Writer
New York City
New York
John Tracy Kidder
Done
Toward
Writing
Spend
Make
Four
Good
Hours
Ends
Firsts
Book
First

More quotes by Tracy Kidder

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I usually write about ordinary people and ordinary things, but Paul Farmer is the least ordinary person I've ever met... He's the leader of a small group of people who hope to cure a sick world, and I hope my book can help in some small way.
Tracy Kidder
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When I select a topic, it's usually a commitment of two to three years of my life
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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The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression
Tracy Kidder
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The problem is fundamental... It is as if a secret committee, now lost to history, has made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to declared that all of them should do it.
Tracy Kidder
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I always want to write something better than the last book.
Tracy Kidder
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Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.
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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My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.
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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I am grateful to Stacy Schiff first of all because she can write a sentence-because she offers us her scholarship with wit, clarity, and grace. Once again, she has done what only the best writers can do: she has made the world new, again.
Tracy Kidder
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I do believe in God. I think God has given so much power to people, and intelligence, and said, 'Well, you are on your own. Maybe I'm tired, I need a nap. You are mature. Why don't you look after yourselves?' And I think He's been sleeping too much.
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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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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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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I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.
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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Paul Farmer has helped to build amazing health care system in one of the poorest areas of Haiti. He founded Partners in Health, which serves the destitute and the sick in many parts of the world from Haiti to Boston and from Russia to Peru.
Tracy Kidder
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People say you cant teach writing, but I think thats nonsense.
Tracy Kidder
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Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.
Tracy Kidder