I just have this feeling that if it weren't for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.

I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.

I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?

... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.

My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired.

"If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity." Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. "I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad."