Each of his son's had been his favorite child.

I do write by hand. I just think - I don't know, it's a physical thing for me. It's a bodily thing. It literally has to earn its way through my hand.

And it was too late. No one wants to believe something is too late, but it is always becoming too late, and then it is.

I would hope that my readers feel a sense of awe at the quality of human endurance, at the endurance of love in the face of a variety of difficulties; that the quotidian life is not always easy, and is something worthy of respect.

I don't especially like to travel, not the way many people do. I know many people that love to go to far-off and different places, and I've never been like that. I seem to get homesick as quickly as a child.

My first job was when I was about 12, cleaning houses in the afternoons for different elderly women in town. I hated it.

All these lives," she said. "All the stories we never know." (125)