My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

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

When it seems you have nothing at all to live for, death is not especially frightening.

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.

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.

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.