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

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.

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.

A minor operation is one that is done on someone else

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.

As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion.

I find that all great directors, and I would include Ben Affleck and Clint Eastwood in that, they have great confidence. And with great confidence comes great freedom for the actor.

I have the feeling it will influence my future writing to the extent that without any material worries I could develop a greater ease, even lightheartedness, in my writing

If you wake up in the morning with a great sense of the things that have to be done in the day in order to get through to the next day, you lose the sense of the day as any kind of end in itself.

Managers often hold on to resisters because of a specific skill set or because they've been around for a long time. Don't.

My parents and grandparents always made me feel fortunate. I'm in a position to help others feel the same. It's just in my heart and is something I feel very very strong about.

I have a tendency to run after people who are completely unattainable and uninterested and make a complete fool of myself.

Every weekend he'd have me come down to work on Dragnet, which by now was on television as well as radio.

I do want to look good still; I do want to be healthy.

I want to be a person that isn't surrounded by their mail and their cat.