“Being the first born gives you great patience.”

If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.

Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.

I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.

We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.

I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.

Another day in paradise’ was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understand what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

And pray, why would this number interest us?” “It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, ‘One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes’.

I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net.

The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.

It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.

Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.

There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’

Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.

I had a great time being a salesman because of the pitches that I gave when I was selling shoes.

Well, just being stupid and politically incorrect doesn’t work. You can be politically incorrect if you’re smart.

You can’t describe the feeling of being in love – when you meet someone who makes you a better person.

Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.

An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being’s, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin.

I grew up being into sports and I wasn’t trained to move my body in the right way for dancing.