My first job was cleaning dog kennels. It was especially, ah, aromatic during those hot, humid Louisiana summers, but it prepared me for Hollywood.

At Lackland Air Force Base, they make an effort to retrain military dogs that suffer from PTSD. It's a lengthy, long process. The treatment is much the same as it would be for people, but it's a difficult road back.

Quite a few of the dogs that come back from Afghanistan or Iraq or police dogs that are involved in violent confrontations where there's gunfire can in fact exhibit the symptoms and suffer from PTSD.

I had a big Akita, Yoshi, who was fabulous. I loved him. We lost him when he was 12, and I've never been able to replace him. Normally, most people lose a pet and get another and keep going on. But it just felt wrong to me; it felt disloyal.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

I don't have a death wish. On the contrary, I'm hanging onto my life like never before.

The death tax is one of the leading causes of the dissolution of small businesses.

As a young surgeon in training at the University of California San Francisco General Hospital in the early '80s, my colleagues and I were inundated with an epidemic of young men with fevers, rashes, swollen lymph nodes and eventually death.