I don't operate on smokers. I tell cigarette smokers that I can operate on you, I get paid the same. And you might even do well. But it's the wrong thing to do. So I refuse to operate on you until you stop smoking.

Food is no longer sacred to us: in becoming too efficient we've changed its nature.

It takes around 30 minutes for your body to realize you're full, so if you're hungry when you sit down to eat, and you eat as quickly as most Americans do, you're just going to keep throwing down food before that feeling kicks in.

You learn how to take care of people from the women in your life.

What we have now is doctors who are actually better technically at what they're doing in their specialty than 30 or 40 years ago, but we lost the relationship, when the doctor would look people in the eye and say, 'I care about you. We can do this together.'

We are spending most of our time in American health care fixing the mistakes that either we in the profession are causing or our patients are, without recognizing it, causing to themselves.

People change based on what they feel, not what they know. Which means that understanding all that advice doesn't matter if there's no deep, profound, visceral awareness of why it's important.