"In my own personal life, God plays a great role in the risk, because I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do - and not only for operating, but for everything."

"We should be concerned not only about the health of individual patients, but also the health of our entire society."

"There's no question that as science, knowledge and technology advance, that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there's no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics."

"Evolution and creationism both require faith. It's just a matter of where you choose to place that faith."

"I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time."

"Craziest thing I've done for love is getting married. I think it's crazy. I think it's crazy, crazy, crazy. I'm never going to say I wouldn't do it again but I have to make sure it's love and not settling for the 'I have to do this by a certain age,' which is kind of what I did."

"I was brought up as an only child, and we were very close. But when I was 14, we got evicted. We came home to a padlock, and I looked up at my mom and she was crying, and there was nothing to do."

"I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function."