Tracy Kidder

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

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

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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