Heart surgeons do not have the world's smallest egos: when you ask them to name the world's three leading practitioners, they never can remember the names of the other two.

I'm lucky in having found the perfect partner to spend my life with

But what I've learned is, when your adrenaline is flowing, you can do a lot. I'm not very physical, but once some punks were trying to break into my house and I chased them down.

Don't tell me I have latent sexism or racism that I need to confront. I don't believe that. I think we are so burned by the current situation that we want somebody that it isn't possible to have. We want someone who definitely looks like the messiah.

I cannot find words to express the depth of my loss or outrage about what's happening to this country. I don't know if I can find the words for it, but if this country ever recovers, it will not be in my lifetime. If I were elected President, the first thing I would do would be to set up a Department of Restoring the Bill of Rights. I would have 10,000 people working there.

I admire about Hillary: Every time I am going to walk away from her candidacy, I think, she has absorbed more hate than anyone I can think of over the past twenty years, and she hasn't cracked under it. That's a kind of iron fortitude that maybe we need in the President of the United States. People project on to Hillary because she is a woman. They either hate her for everything they hate about women or they long for her to be everything they want in a woman. It's an impossible burden.

I realised I'd never climb Everest but thought I could still write a book