Medicine involves dealing with people who are going through changes and cycles, often people trapped in bodies that are going out from under them. Spending time with them lets you think their way, gives you insights as a writer.

Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.

It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.

Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.

I want to prove to myself and everybody else how good I can be, and I'm willing to work as hard as I need to to achieve that goal.

Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year - and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!

I do think one success of Northern Europe, which the United States came from, was its willingness to accept innovation in business practices like Adam Smith and the whole Enlightenment. It essentially made the merchant class free instead of controlled by the king and aristocracy. That was essential.

I'm an eternal realist and the success rate for being an actor is pretty low.