As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives -- everyone dies eventually -- but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness.

Human knowledge is never contained in just one person.

What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.

Even if you are perfect the World isn't.

Literature not only illuminated another's experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection

Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job- not a calling.

A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.

People often ask if it was calling. My answer always is yes.

Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job-- not a calling.

[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture—and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.

The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement.

I am opposed to millionaires but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

If the Church is a body, and the body is a business, isn't that the same thing as prostitution?

In your heart you know he's right.

There is only laughing across the land as the car moves you along, on your way someplace with love in the car.

Canada is like a nice family living over a biker bar . . . They keep telling the downstairs neighbors to keep down the noise, people are trying to sleep.

We are the total of our longings.

I worked with my parents on the stage in production numbers since I was 4, but I never really gave much thought to being a performer on my own until I was 12 or 13.

My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from any of it.

It takes a person who is wide awake to make his dream come true.

Alcohol had a lot to do with it, too, and mental instability. All writers are narcissistic, manic-depressive drug addicts and alcoholics, and I am no exception.