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One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

Doctors are human; they make mistakes, and you have to stay on top of them. You have to ask the second question, the third question, the follow-up to the fourth question.

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

When a man goes through six years training to be a doctor he will never be the same. He knows too much.

Medicine really matured me as a person because, as a physician, you're obviously dealing with life and death issues, issues much more serious than what we're talking about in entertainment. You can't get more serious than life and death. And if you can handle that, you can handle anything.

Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.

Being intellectually hospitable is a virtue that I bring into the interview space.

Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap.

Once I started working with older people, I realized how much I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of taking care of patients who have multiple, complex medical problems.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.