I remember the awakening that occurred in me when I read, for the first time, Franz Kafka. ... That morning I was happy. I wanted to run out and embrace them, all these garbage collectors, because they taught me that there was another world than the world of Kafka, which is absurd and desperate, and despairing.

I remember reading The Making of a Surgeon when I was in probably about the sixth or seventh grade. And that was a book that kind of got me focused, I think, on the career path. And I remember, one thing in there I still remember is that you can always tell you’ve really arrived as a surgeon when the nurses in the hospital ask you to be their physician.

I think fiction is very important because it gets us into the mind of a person. Hamlet is a tremendous piece of literature. You know Hamlet better than you know most real people. Do you know the reason? Because you know what he’s thinking. And this teaches you that every human has an integrity and an autonomy and a spirituality of his own, of her own, and great literature can teach you that.

I’d been introduced to Freud through all this because I couldn’t understand why is it so difficult to be brave. There was something inside me that wanted to collaborate all the time with the people who wanted to destroy me, and I was searching for it, and I found there was a thing called the unconscious that everybody has. And you’ve got to be in touch with the unconscious to understand a lot of your behavior. And I read through volume after volume after volume of the collected works of Sigmund Freud.