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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.

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.

Although surgeons know how to deal with bits of the brain, they don't really know how it works.

We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.

Neurologists have a host of clinical tests that let them observe what a brain-damaged patient can and cannot do.

I think often there is great rivalry between neurosurgeons and cardiac surgeons. I think I maybe have a bit of bias with neurosurgeons' opinion that nothing tops neurosurgery! But that makes for a quite interesting conflict between the two.

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.

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.

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.