Tracy Kidder Quotations

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I'm a little suspicious of the great, overarching view. It always leaves something out.

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

From my experience, sure, if you were a truck driver, you could be incredibly unlucky, ... But I had the feeling that I was safer than I would have been back here as a late adolescent with a car.

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,

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

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

PIH combines idealism and brilliance to a degree I've never witnessed before in the public charity arena,

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

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.

Don't join America's collective amnesia for the suffering that seems so distant but in fact surrounds us, ... Don't forget about the forgotten people in this world.

The view from the summit of Mt. Holyoke has been one of the most famous landscapes in America. And yet, all these things are going on underneath.

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

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

Northampton has layers and layers. I saw a whole side of it I didn't know, hadn't imagined had existed.

You don't get far with people by judging them, and one of the nice things of my profession is I don't have to. It makes things a lot more fun, more interesting.

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.

I'm sure that many set out for Vietnam feeling confused or unhappy, as adolescents tend to do,

I grew up in Long Island, a place that vanished in front of my eyes. I grew up there in the '50s, in the great building boom. It was pretty distressing-you go away and come home and find a whole town gone, a cloverleaf in its place.

The underside of a town as nice as Northampton can still be pretty gritty.

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

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

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

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

The only real nation is humanity

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.

In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer's power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, though subtlety went into its design.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.

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.

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

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

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

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

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... 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.

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.

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.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.