Tracy Kidder Quotes

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

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

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.

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

among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

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.

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

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

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

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.

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

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

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

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

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

That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.

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

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

The only real nation is humanity

...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.

I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.

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 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.

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

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

... "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

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

My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.

I've gotta keep life and computers separate, or else I'm gonna go mad.

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 always want to write something better than the last book.

The ocean doesn't care about you. It makes your boat feel tiny. The oceans are great promoters of religion, or at least of humility-but not in everyone.

People say you cant teach writing, but I think thats nonsense.

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.

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

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

Obviously, computers have made differences. They have fostered the development of spaceships- as well as a great increase in junk mail.

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.

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

Outside, the afternoon sun was an orange sliver on an icy horizon.