Top 100 Kidder's Quotes
#1. We were sweet, lovely people who wanted to throw out all the staid institutions who placed money and wars above all else. When you're young you think that's how life works.
Margot Kidder
#2. Among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all
Tracy Kidder
#3. The thing about being famous is, it's weird. The only people who get how weird it is are other famous people.
Margot Kidder
#4. If I gun down my boss in the carpark after work then he won't be able to terrorise all his other employees and the greater good will have been served.
Rushworth M Kidder
#5. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#6. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#7. My grandson sees me as Lois on TV every Christmas, and that scores me points.
Margot Kidder
#8. I went to work and did a lot of homework about what was wrong with me.
Margot Kidder
#9. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#10. It was a wonderful time to be young. The 1960s didn't end until about 1976. We all believed in Make Love, Not War. We were idealistic innocents, despite the drugs and sex.
Margot Kidder
#11. 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
#12. I was reading all these books, including the Bible - and I'm an atheist.
Margot Kidder
#13. You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.
Tracy Kidder
#14. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#15. I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why.
Tracy Kidder
#16. The thing about the wacky fans is that they're really sweet.
Margot Kidder
#17. I'd had episodes before, but I swept them under the carpet. This time, I couldn't do that because everyone knew. I got on with the hard work of getting better and haven't had a blip in almost 10 years.
Margot Kidder
#18. I think the little girl in Smallville is terrific, but I only watched it once.
Margot Kidder
#19. People say you can't teach writing, but I think that's nonsense.
Tracy Kidder
#20. Obviously, computers have made differences. They have fostered the development of spaceships- as well as a great increase in junk mail.
Tracy Kidder
#21. Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.
Arthur Miller
#22. When you burn out, you lose enthusiasm. I always loved computers. All of a sudden I just didn't care. It was, all of a sudden, a job.
Tracy Kidder
#23. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#24. As they say, the first step in fixing something is getting it to break.
Tracy Kidder
#25. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#26. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#27. god gives but does not share" --haitian proverb
Tracy Kidder
#28. I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.
Tracy Kidder
#29. In the process Paul laid out a comprehensive theory of poverty, of a world designed by the elites of all nations to serve their own ends, the pieces of the design enshrined in ideologies, which erased the histories of how things came to be as they were.
Tracy Kidder
#30. If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don't like is bound to happen.
Tracy Kidder
#31. We didn't have movies in this little mining town. When I was 12 my mom took me to New York and I saw Bye Bye Birdie, with people singing and dancing, and that was it.
Margot Kidder
#32. It is not a large exaggeration to say that everything else in a computer exists in order to bring information swiftly to the ALU for manipulation; and for the ALU, adding is the mechanical equivalent of breathing. But
Tracy Kidder
#33. By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success.
Tracy Kidder
#34. If you're gonna fall apart, do it in your own bedroom.
Margot Kidder
#35. Babylonian scientists used a counting system based on the number sixty, which is why minutes have sixty seconds.
David S. Kidder
#36. The really tough choices ... don't center upon right versus wrong. They involve right versus right. They are genuine dilemmas precisely because each side is firmly rooted in one of our basic, core values.
Rushworth Kidder
#37. I liked the fact that Lois was one person with Clark and another with Superman. I think that, as women, we do that a lot when we fall in love.
Margot Kidder
#39. Rasala had named the two new prototypes Tartis and Gallifrey, after the home planet and time machine of Dr. Who, the protagonist of a science fiction show on public TV.
Tracy Kidder
#40. Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.
Tracy Kidder
#41. The first Superman film took up a huge chunk of our lives, but it was a wonderful time for us. We were young, my daughter was little, we were filming in London for a year, so we became like a close family.
Margot Kidder
#42. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#43. When I select a topic, it's usually a commitment of two to three years of my life.
Tracy Kidder
#44. They fired director Richard Donner because they didn't want to pay him, and he's the reason the franchise became so successful in the first place. There's a big part of Superman II that he did that no one has ever seen.
Margot Kidder
#45. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#46. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#47. I had always thought of Chris as my kid brother and watching how this kid, as I still thought of him, had affected so many people's lives around the world was incredible.
Margot Kidder
#48. So many people, he thought, don't listen to the content of what you say but only to the noises you make.
Tracy Kidder
#49. On the contrary, a company was more likely to asphyxiate on its own success.
Tracy Kidder
#50. Chris was a friend of mine, I loved him. I didn't see him for 18 months before he died, but I'd met him several times after the accident. What was remarkable was his personal growth in his interior life.
Margot Kidder
#51. In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.
Tracy Kidder
#52. You don't have a lot of time; you have to get it right. It's amazing how they create these episodes in such a short amount of time. They lavish a lot of care and money on each episode, and they just look terrific.
Margot Kidder
#53. I felt vigorous and cheered by borrowed popularity.
Tracy Kidder
#54. Horrifying as it was to crack up in the public eye, it made me look at myself and fix it. People were exploitative; that's human nature.
Margot Kidder
#55. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#56. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#57. I love horror movies because they're really fun. They tap into those wonderful primal emotions.
Margot Kidder
#58. It seemed as though Margaret hovered near Alice, aware of Alice when Alice didn't seem to be aware of Margaret.
Tracy Kidder
#59. The last thing I want to do is expend my energy trying to convince my own coworkers.
Tracy Kidder
#60. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#61. I was very active in the peace movement, still am.
Margot Kidder
#62. A kidder gets to be an awful thing around a camp if his stuff goes sort of sour.
Ernest Hemingway,
#63. He sniffed, and said as others had before him and others no doubt would again, I have learned never to say, 'Never again.
Tracy Kidder
#64. One winter night, at his home, while he was stirring up the logs in his fireplace, he muttered, "Computers are irrelevant." Building
Tracy Kidder
#65. I was in two episodes playing Christopher Reeve's character's emissary. They wanted to have my character announce Dr Swan's death, which I thought was exploitative.
Margot Kidder
#66. I think Farmer taps into a universal anxiety and also into a fundamental place in some troubled consciences, into what he calls "ambivalence," the often unacknowledged uneasiness that some of the fortunate feel about their place in the world, the thing he once told me he designed his life to avoid.
Tracy Kidder
#67. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#68. I remember laughing an inordinate amount of time. Setting up scenes that involve ooze coming out basements, or pigs' heads flying through windows is really fun. How could you not laugh?
Margot Kidder
#69. If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.
Tracy Kidder
#70. What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative.
Tracy Kidder
#71. Depakote also has a really bad side effect, which is death.
Margot Kidder
#73. Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.
Tracy Kidder
#74. I'm a grandmother with dogs and nice friends here in the Rocky mountains. Ever see the movie A River Runs Through It? That's where I live. It's beautiful, no two ways about it.
Margot Kidder
#75. The moral climate of any organization, larger than that of the individual, is created hour by hour through the multitude of choices and behaviors of its members.
Rushworth Kidder
#76. Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.
Tracy Kidder
#77. I don't buy into any of that hogwash. They put that out to sell tickets. It's just a classic horror movie, with the Greek drama formula of good versus evil, and lots of fear.
Margot Kidder
#78. When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.
Tracy Kidder
#81. Nothing spooky or terrible happened on set, but we were told to say it had. We were giving a press conference and the writers were going on about these terrible things that supposedly happened while we were filming.
Margot Kidder
#82. I don't know who the actresses all are. I've never heard of Kate but I'm sure she'll do fine.
Margot Kidder
#83. I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.
Tracy Kidder
#84. The thing about all good horror movies is that the fans expect a couple of inside jokes. Maybe I'm supposed to be saying how terrified I was while making it, but it was really fun.
Margot Kidder
#85. God, George Bush makes me want to slash my wrists. He's so embarrassing I have to leave the room when he's on the news. What a monkey.
Margot Kidder
#86. You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.
Tracy Kidder
#88. Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.
Tracy Kidder
#89. Good ideas, like good pickles, are crisp, enduring, and devilishly hard to make.
Rushworth Kidder
#90. There's a new science out called orthomolecular medicine. You correct the chemical imbalance with amino acids and vitamins and minerals that are naturally in the body.
Margot Kidder
#91. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#92. I always want to write something better than the last book.
Tracy Kidder
#93. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#94. I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows - it's usually hard to read.
Tracy Kidder
#96. The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression.
Tracy Kidder
#97. There's this unspoken club where you say to each other: Oh God, if they only knew how ordinary I was, they wouldn't be interested. That includes movie stars and politicians.
Margot Kidder
#98. That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.
Tracy Kidder
#99. With any group of people in life, sad things happen, and crazy things, and happy things. When you're in the public eye, it's just amplified, that's all.
Margot Kidder
#100. 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.
Tracy Kidder
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