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Brain surgery couldn't happen without the patient's own active voice to guide the work. The patient is part of the surgical team here, perhaps the most important part, and above all, that's what makes neurosurgery different.

Brain surgeons are dealing with the very last thread of life, and they have to be very confident, but I think they tend to remember their failures rather than their successes, and that must be very hard. Who do you share that failure with? That's why their personal lives are often disastrous.

In a vague way, I always knew neurosurgery was different - more delicate, more difficult, more demanding. After all, we say things like, 'I'm no brain surgeon,' for a reason.

While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons' work is the crucible of identity. Every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves.

You can teach somebody how to be a brain surgeon, but you cannot teach them how to walk on a stage and make people laugh.

Young kids are doing the same thing I did, but they're doing it differently. They don't do brain surgery the way they used to do it either.

Fashion and style is just that. Fashion and style. It's not brain surgery.

When you play a doctor, you have to look like you can do it but you don't actually go and do it. It's not like you learn how to cut open somebody and go do surgery. You have to think of a human being and not play the idea of what that would look like.

Surgeons always underestimate the pain and disability involved in what they do to people.