Intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over.

I write because I like to write. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythm of words. It is a satisfaction like that which follows good and shared love.

There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.

Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.

On all levels American society is rigged. I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis.

I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out.

There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn't necessarily a lie even if it didn't necessarily happen.