You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.