"I have a very long relationship with America. My mother grew up there and I felt to some extent that I partly belong there. I was schooled there briefly for about a year."

"I always thought the biggest failing of Americans was their lack of irony. They are very serious there! Naturally, there are exceptions... the Jewish, Italian, and Irish humor of the East Coast."

"I think it's quite extraordinary that people cast me as if I'm Warren Beatty: until I met my present wife, at the age of 35, you could name two girlfriends."

"My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there's no virtue in that it's the way one is raised."

"To love deeply is to give someone the power to heal what words cannot reach — an essential principle for the reflective life."

"Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created."

"You can't have public health without a public health system. We just don't want to be part of a mindless competition for resources. We want to build back capacity in the system."

"Disease is an experience of a so-called mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body."