I could easily have decided that life was cruel, that being black meant everything was stacked against me.

Everyone in the world worth being nice to. Because God never creates inferior human beings, each person deserves respect and dignity.

I got involved with classical music when I was in high school and it's followed me throughout my entire life and probably had a profound effect on my life.

If you don't have anything useful to say then you attack people. If you feel that your house of cards has been discovered and is starting to come unraveled, you become very desperate. Intelligent people tend to talk about the facts. They don't sit around and call each other names. That's what you can find on a third grade playground.

I don't want my kids to grow up with no father like I did. I came to the conclusion a while ago that you can work until midnight and not be finished or you can work until 6 or 7 and not be finished. I decided I'd rather work until 6 or 7.

We have the purveyors of hatred who take every single incident between people of two races and try to make a race war out of it, and drive wedges into people. And this does not need to be done.

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.