As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.

A single, ordinary person still can make a difference - and single, ordinary people are doing precisely that every day.

And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.

Life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed.

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.

He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.

The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th centurys first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.