A Quote by Tracy Kidder

I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam. — © Tracy Kidder
I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.
I wrote 'Yellow Submarine' for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for 'The Games,' about the Olympic Games. I wrote 'Love Story,' both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote 'RPM' for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson!
When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.
The first novel that I wrote was because I was having very interesting sorts of experiences, for Indians of my generation.
Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it.
Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form - not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.
Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form: not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.
I wrote 'Don't Look Back' in November 2011, and when I wrote the novel, it wasn't contracted, so there was a freedom in that - no expectations or anything like that. It was also my first contemporary novel I'd written and sold, which was to Disney/Hyperion in January of 2012.
Our young men in Vietnam have not only acquitted themselves in an outstanding manner during combat operations, but they also have been outstanding ambassadors of goodwill in the vital civic action and pacification work among the tortured populace of South Vietnam.
I flew in combat in Vietnam. I got shot at, I shot back, I got shot down. Compared to this flight, I felt a lot safer in combat.
We wrote the songs we wrote - we took from our own experiences, melded it together, and wrote what became 'Appetite For Destruction.'
More than half the combat deaths in Vietnam occurred after Richard Nixon was elected on a promise to bring the war to an end, and after the American people had already decided that they did not want one more soldier to die in Vietnam.
When I wrote 'Savage Season,' it was three years later before I wrote the second Hap and Leonard novel. Whenever I wrote one, I never intended to write the next one.
When I was writing my first novel, I smoked cigarettes. And when I think about what it was like to smoke, I remember exactly the feeling of sitting in front of my big old computer in that little room where I wrote my first novel.
None of the people's wars of the sixties did very well, including the one in Vietnam. Vo Nguyen Giap himself has admitted a loss of 600,000 men between 1965 and 1968...Moreover, by about 1970 at least 80% of the day-to-day combat in South Vietnam was being carried on by regular NVA troops...Genuine black-pajama southern guerrillas had been decimated and amounted to no more than 20% of the communist fighting forces.
The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.
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