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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
Book
First
Done
Toward
Writing
Spend
Make
Four
Good
Hours
Ends
Firsts

More quotes by 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'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.
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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.
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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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The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression
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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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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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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People say you cant teach writing, but I think thats nonsense.
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 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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Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.
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
Tracy Kidder
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The only real nation is humanity
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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When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.
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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My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.
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