Tracy Kidder Quotes

We have no filter for music, but we feel it when what's being spoken and sung is telling a story and evidencing a character.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

Stories are our attempts to share our values & beliefs with the hopes that we may attract those who believe what we believe. This is the basis of forming a trusting relationship. Story telling, therefor, is only worthwhile when it tells what you stand for, not what you do.

Humans know when it's not a good story. Unless you do this for a living, you may not know exactly why you don't like a story, but you can't fool an audience ever. They know when you have it and they know when you don't.

If you tell the story emotionally in a truthful way, then you start naturally looking at the landscape and thinking "Wow, we have to watch out."

I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.

When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.

We learn best - and change - from hearing stories that strike a chord within us.

The most intoxicating thing about being an actor is to surrender to a story that you never would have come up with.

I love things that are old and beautiful and tell a story, even if it's a sad one.

Often, the stories are very much like trust falls. You fall, and you hope the story's going to catch you.

All of my stories are 95 percent truthful.

I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work.

If you tell an amateur that his story is not good, he always declares indignantly: 'Oh, but it really happened just like this!' The writer who doesn't understand that this is beside the point is not a writer at all.

This is the mythosphere. It's made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs, legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth. As you can see, it's constantly growing and moving as people invent new tales to tell or find new things to believe. The older strands move out to become these spirals, where things tend to become quite crude and dangerous. They've hardened off, you see.

I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp.

You'll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories.

My favorite stories are human, so I'm always looking for...

We sit and listen and are enthralled anew, for good stories, it seems, never lose their magic.

But I keep going on with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance, if I meet you or if you escape, in the future or in heaven or in prison or underground, some other place. What they have in common is that they're not here. By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

I always find it fun to read a script and then find the messages in the script because I believe every story has them.

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

Frank Sinatra said this great thing, that singing isn't about singing in tune, or great technical singing. It's about making people believe in the story you're telling.

The world is dark, and light is precious. Come closer, dear reader. You must trust me. I am telling you a story.