Usually one of two ways. Either I see something in the world and I’m like, “I want to make that picture,” or I see a picture and I’m like, “I want to make that painting.” And then I look for a way to make it out of stuff in my world. So I guess the first process is more, like, self-explanatory; you make some sketches, take pictures. I usually make notes about color, particularly try to get one color relationship true in the sense that the distance in terms of value or temperature of those two colors is true. Not necessarily the colors themselves, but the way they relate to each other. Make notes about that. Then come back to the studio, and maybe 10% of the time I just start working on a painting. And then maybe 30% of the time I make drawings and start that way. And then the other…is from looking at a painting and seeing a question and a solution posed by someone else, and trying to pose the same question and find the same answer, or a similar answer. And my way into that is to find a subject in my surroundings that seems structurally suitable, I guess.

I can’t say there’s a specific place to begin when it comes to creating virtual identities, but it’s important to consider them in the longview. What stays here—in web pages, caches, and hard drives—might be the things that people retain of you in the future ahead. Where scholars might spend years studying the journals and letters of our predecessors, these personal accounts are infinitely more robust. Even if it is a private pursuit, an external drive full of personal exploration can be such a gift to those not here yet.

I was about to answer cheesily, “It starts me,” but it actually does. I search. I put in a lot of time reading, taking notes, writing in that grasping way that feels mostly wrong. Usually it begins with an image and then the voice comes. Once I have the voice, the book presents. Annie Ernaux talked about it as channeling, and I don’t want to over romanticize it, because there’s a lot of bodily discipline that goes into the making. But I do think that, for me, that’s how a first draft feels. It’s like just keeping up with the voice in my head, being true to it, clinically so—like a pact. I love that first draft, because it’s pre-scrutiny, pre-analysis.

A typical day is probably lots of meetings and stuff. But if it’s an idea that we’re developing, what might happen is I might talk to some of the people in the lab, maybe have them come in the office and brainstorm with them, and say, “Well, here’s a problem that we need to solve,” or need to solve better. So just as an example, when I had this idea that we could create better materials, I got about four or five people together with different backgrounds — chemistry, engineering, safety, toxicology — and we started putting chemical structures on the blackboard and say, “Well, this might work,” or “This might not be safe,” and ended up with certain structures that we thought would be good. And then, one of the guys would go out and try to make those structures, and we’d go from there.

I’ve been mortally opposed to the so-called life-and-death committees that were instituted. When there were many more patients that needed to be dialyzed, and not enough artificial kidneys available, you had the institution of the life-and-death committees. ... Depending on the answer to these questions, he could be dialyzed. Otherwise, he could go to hell. I’ve been mortally opposed to that. When I set up a dialysis center here with a grant from some government agency, I was forced to put in a life-and-death committee, but it never met.

In my early years it was undoubtedly my father. My father was director of a sanatorium for pulmonary tuberculosis, and at that time there were no antibiotics, tuberculosis was a terrible disease. And, he and I would walk in the woods around that sanatorium and he would discuss his worries about his patients. And from him, I certainly inherited this extreme concern about the well-being of patients. I’ve seen him very happy when he succeeded after months and months of rest and other things to have these people go home cured. I’ve also seen him crying and desperate after trying for a long time and a patient did not get well, and went home to die.

By the way, the guys with very high grades are not necessarily the people that are the most successful in later life. They may be the ones that can regurgitate gracefully, and they get very high grades. But if the guys that have to work for it and do not have such good grades can do something extra, and prove that they can perform, they may have a chance.

No. You see immediately what your next task will be. I’ve been asked all kinds of silly questions, like “Aren’t you proud? Aren’t you this? Aren’t you that?” I have no time for that, because the next project is upon me.