Tracy Kidder Quotes (46 Quotes)

I wanted to stay with my friends on Long Island, but I finally agreed to take a look at Andover. I remember being impressed by the school's extraordinary facilities. I thought about it long and hard and decided to give it a try.

For months I'd been trying to convince myself, by convincing everybody back home, that in the crucible of war I'd made that great transition,

What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative.

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression.

When I select a topic, it's usually a commitment of two to three years of my life.

Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

I was really so afraid. Of my own shadow practically.

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.

Memory is so much a part of imagination, so plastic, so wonderfully plastic.

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time.

I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.

I can't invent stuff, but the techniques fiction writers use to create character and suspense can also be used when writing non-fiction.

Suddenly the idea of being a writer seemed much more romantic-and a great way to impress girls.

New Journalism was such the rage with authors like Tom Wolfe and John McPhee. All I kept hearing was that non-fiction was so much more interesting than the novels being written at that time.

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.

I never planned on doing a book about Paul Farmer or his organization. I met him in Haiti when I was on a magazine assignment. It's almost like his story sort of fell in my lap.

If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.

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.

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.

I would read and write all night long and, as a result, wound up cutting a lot of my other classes.

We shouldn't forget how terrifying untamed landscape was to early settlers. From their perspective, mankind was put here in the New World to conquer the wilderness.

Andover was like a monastery back then. We worked all the time. The hazing was ferocious-I still hate to think about it.

At the time I began writing the book about Northampton, I had recently been in Haiti to do a story for the New Yorker. I don't think I would previously have been able to imagine a place as dreadful as Haiti, and when I came back I couldn't help but think about the advantages we have in this place.

Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.

I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows - it's usually hard to read.

I think there's a certain level of decency and honor.

The world doesn't make much sense to me generally. I don't feel like I'm good at that.

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

I wanted some way to invite readers in, to set the stage for the book - and I tried many different things.

I always want to write something better than the last book.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia.

If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don't like is bound to happen.

Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.

Returning to Northampton, I thought here's a town that seems to be working pretty well, and I wonder why.

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.

In a very basic way, a prominent landmark such as Mt. Holyoke tells you where you are. They let you know that you're not the first person in a place.

Right now I'm really researching for a good non-fiction story... I doubt that I'll ever find a subject like Paul Farmer ever again.

I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why.

When we see a bag lady ... on the street, in that moment in our lives we try to get as far away from that person as possible, ... But the truth is, that person is me. That person is all of us, to a certain extent.

Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.

I like particular people, particular places.

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.

When Farmer asked the farmers when they had come to America to work in such miserable conditions, they responded, Have you ever seen Haiti ... ... Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans who threw off their extremely cruel French masters and created their own new home. It's the only place in the world where this happened, but it happened in 1804, while slavery still flourished here in the United States.

I tell beginning readers to read a lot and write a lot. If you want to write a book, find a subject that's really worth the time and effort you'll put in.

Painting the landscape was, in a sense, another means of exerting control, of imposing order on the disorderly.

People say you can't teach writing, but I think that's nonsense.