When you're in medicine - especially when you're a resident in a public hospital - you feel like you're doing your part. But not when you're a writer.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My writing flows out of my doctorhood. They are not separate things. They are one. I think the foremost connection between being a doctor and being a writer is the great privilege of having an intimate view of one's fellow humans, the privilege of being there and helping other people at their most vulnerable moments.
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.
My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.
Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.
I no longer practice medicine, but I can say that, for me, medicine was easier - and certainly less emotionally turbulent - than writing.
I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not.
I always wanted to be a writer. Maybe, had I been brought up in another generation, I might have just gone into writing rather than medicine - which is not to say that I didn't also have a great attraction towards the idea of being a healer. Fortunately, I've been able to combine the two in ways I could never possibly have imagined.
When I'm engaged in a story my health is not a big deal, but when I'm not doing anything, if you sit me down, I can get tied up in my own medical dramas. So I much prefer to work.
Writing does change you, and of course it feels good to do things, so you could say writing is de facto therapeutic. But really, one writes to write.
Feeling useful in medicine allows me to not feel so stupid when making up stories.
No opposing quotes found.