Quote of the day: There are writers who craft sentences, and there are writers who change lives. Mitch Albom has spent nearly four decades doing both, and often in the same breath. Born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1958, he arrived in Detroit in 1985 as a young freelance journalist with a sociology degree from Brandeis, a journalism master's from Columbia, and a habit of paying his tuition by playing piano in bars. What followed was one of the most quietly extraordinary careers in American letters: 13 first-place wins from the Associated Press Sports Editors, eight consecutive number-one New York Times bestsellers, Emmy Award-winning television films, a musical, a nationally syndicated column, and a philanthropy empire built around the city that adopted him. Yet for all his accolades, it is a single sentence, small enough to fit on a fortune cookie, vast enough to contain a philosophy, that may reveal the man most clearly.
