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

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.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel

The rich are different than you and me: they have more money and they have more power.

People have less privacy and are crammed together in cities, but in the wide open spaces they secretly keep tabs on each other a lot more

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating

My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.