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Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

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.

If I weren't a writer, I'd be a psychiatrist.

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.

Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.

I really don't feel that writing is therapy.

Psychoanalysts seem to be long on information and short on application.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.