A minor operation is one that is done on someone else

Surgery is the red flower that blooms among the leaves and thorns that are the rest of medicine.

And If the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul.

You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body.

The surgeon knows all the parts of the brain but he does not know his patient's dreams.

You do not die all at once. Some tissues live on for minutes, even hours, giving still their little cellular shrieks, molecular echoes of the agony of the whole corpus.

Each is like a river that leaves behind its name and shape, the whole course of its path , to vanish into the vast sea of God.

Autopsies give us the facts but not the truth.

Thus is the fruit of the Earth taken, its flesh torn. Thus is it given over standing, toward rot. It is the principle of corruption, the death of what is, the birth of what is to be. You are wine.

The heart is pure theater throbbing in its cage palpably as any nightingale.

I contemplate the body, dead and diseased as well as alive and healthy.

It is good knowing that glasses are to drink from; the bad thing is not to know what thirst is for.

'The Lorax,'...it's a mythical, woodland creature, right, who's for saving trees. He speaks for the trees because no one else can. Kind of the way conservatives speak for fetuses.

When I think of our condition, my heart is heavy. I see men of my own race treated as outlaws and driven from country to country, or shot down like animals.

Nobody as of today can produce any oral or written statement from me talking about changing the constitution.

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.

All systems require myths for their longevity.

What if the question is not why I am so infrequently the person I really want to be, but why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

I'm not trying to be the new anybody.

Food, clothing and shelter — these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception.