I think I could probably make $5 to $10m movies for a very long time and live a perfectly good life doing it. I’d probably get paid as well as a surgeon, which is pretty damn remarkable for a guy who went to film school.
There is a tendency of people to try to make you believe only a few people are smart. As a brain surgeon, I know better than that.
When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.
On bad days, I think I’d like to be a plastic surgeon who goes to Third World countries and operates on children in villages with airlifts, and then I think, ‘Yeah, right, I’m going to go back to undergraduate school and take all the biology I missed and then go to medical school.’ No. No.
Choosing my career was always based on job satisfaction rather than financial security. I wanted to get a job in science; I enjoyed being a surgeon and I now enjoy being an academic and having a media career.
On Saturday, I was a surgeon in South Africa, very little known. On Monday, I was world renowned.
I’m the son of a surgeon and the grandson of a surgeon.
In the immediate aftermath of the civil-rights movement, Democrats marketed liberalism to us as fashionable, sophisticated and liberating. Today it needs a surgeon general’s warning: hazardous to your family and the values you were taught as a child.
You look at a surgeon as you would a secular priest, almost, if it’s your child, if it’s your sister on the operating table. That was an idea that very much has interested me and I’ve wanted to explore for some time.
I do know that detachment is important. A surgeon can’t be weeping into the open wound.
It wasn’t the ‘miracle of engineering’ that is the human body that was filling me with a mad desire to live my days and nights in a pair of scrubs. The hard truth was I did not remotely want to be a surgeon. I actually just wanted to be on ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’
Growing up in a family of doctors, I wanted to be a brain surgeon for a while. But ultimately, I get most excited about creating things, which is why I decided to become an entrepreneur.
I’m not a plastic surgeon, and I cannot change the DNA of a person, but when I see a woman try on my clothes and she feels beautiful, I know I am doing my job.
In my eyes, there’s heroes I look up to. People who saved me – my caretakers, people at Boston Medical Center. My surgeon. The people that pulled me off that ground, who pulled me out. Those are my heroes. The police. The paramedics. Those are the true heroes.
I am a great admirer of Sen. Frist, who is a nationally known heart surgeon and well known in Nashville as a great family man who has dedicated his life to helping others and, in that regard, he has followed in his father’s footsteps.
The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.
Surgeons are not technicians; they’re not mechanics. They’re artists. I see patterns where not many other people see patterns. …I think that’s what made me a good surgeon, and now, that’s what’s making me a good writer.
Let me put it this way: I don’t plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can’t retire and do brain surgery – or at least he better not.
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.
I put in the same hours to get good at this as a surgeon who went to college. It’s just a much less important job in the realm of society.
Acting is a great way to make a living, especially when I consider what my alternatives were and probably still are. I mean, you are only making movies. It is a lot less pressure than being a surgeon; although it seemed like the only other thing that I was qualified for was manual labour.
When I began my tenure as surgeon general, I did not intend to focus on emotional well-being.
You wouldn’t tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or a underperforming midwife at your child’s birth. Why is it that we tolerate underperforming teachers in the classroom?
I tell a student that the most important class you can take is technique. A great chef is first a great technician. ‘If you are a jeweler, or a surgeon or a cook, you have to know the trade in your hand. You have to learn the process. You learn it through endless repetition until it belongs to you.
I always thought Jon Stewart was an extremely good surgeon with his scalpel. He would have Republicans on who, I guess, were unclear about what Stewart was up to, and while Jon Stewart was being nice, he was building a case for drowning them.
A well-off plastic surgeon can suffer just as much as an Irish lad who has been abused or whatever.
I see myself at a certain age as not being able to play the kind of parts that would keep me stimulated, and I can’t imagine my life ending professionally the moment that I’ve got to go to the plastic surgeon and have my face rearranged.
As a young surgeon in training at the University of California San Francisco General Hospital in the early ’80s, my colleagues and I were inundated with an epidemic of young men with fevers, rashes, swollen lymph nodes and eventually death.
Humanity abhors, above all things, a vacuum in itself, and your class will be cut off from humanity as the surgeon cuts the cancer and alien growth from the body.
Well, the responsibility of the surgeon general is to make sure that the public has access to science and access to it in a way that is understandable and that is applicable to their everyday lives.
I grew up in Hollywood, California. A lot of my parents’ friends were in the motion picture industry, but I saw their doctor friends as more solid. I admired them; there was a peacefulness in them, a sense of purpose that I liked. So I became very interested in being a surgeon.
I wanted to be a brain surgeon, but I had a bad habit of dropping things.
I had a friend who was a plastic surgeon, so he would do little things. I never had, like, a full thing. So I would go in maybe once every two or three years, and he’d do a little here, a little there; tweak you, like you tweak your car. Then I became the plastic surgery poster girl.
A surgeon wouldn’t sell his tools. A lawyer doesn’t sell his law books. I’m not going to sell my horse. I’m a sportsman.
When most people think of economists, they think of macro-economists. Macro-economists try to describe or – even harder – predict the movements of a hugely dynamic system. They’re like a transplant surgeon trying to simultaneously transplant every failing organ in someone’s body.
Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who is now behind the counter when you renew your car registration at the department of motor vehicles.
I have a great surgeon that put me together.
In our culture, good looks are so important, and today he’d head straight for a plastic surgeon, but in Cyrano’s time, the nose was who he was, and it didn’t matter that he was a brilliant poet, a brilliant swordsman, a brilliant man. His nose defined him.
I grew up in a very high-achieving family. I have a brother who’s a Harvard-educated cardiothoracic surgeon. My other brother is a two-time Olympian, fifth-round draft pick for the Philadelphia Eagles, and an entrepreneur and philanthropist.
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