Quote

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
Problem
Number
Children
Numbers
Disposed
Made
Greatest
Declared
Study
Committee
Least
Committees
Secret
Figured
History
Fundamental
Lost
Fundamentals

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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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Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.
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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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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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My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.
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I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.
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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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When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.
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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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Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.
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The only real nation is humanity
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People say you cant teach writing, but I think thats nonsense.
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Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.
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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.
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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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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.
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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
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The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression
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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