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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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Tracy Kidder
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: November 12
Writer
New York City
New York
John Tracy Kidder
Lost
Fundamentals
Problem
Number
Children
Numbers
Disposed
Made
Greatest
Declared
Study
Committee
Least
Committees
Secret
Figured
History
Fundamental

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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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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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In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.
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My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.
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People say you cant teach writing, but I think thats nonsense.
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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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The only real nation is humanity
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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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The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression
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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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I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.
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Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.
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If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.
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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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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.
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I always want to write something better than the last book.
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When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.
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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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I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.
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