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

More quotes by Tracy Kidder

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I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.
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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.
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Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.
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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.
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People say you cant teach writing, but I think thats nonsense.
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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.
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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.
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In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.
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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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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.
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The only real nation is humanity
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God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us
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I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.
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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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If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.
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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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Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.
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Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.
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When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.
Tracy Kidder