If you buy a sweater for €1,000 and you know that the funds you are paying are also going to help to build a hospital and a school, wouldn't you think better about it?
Maybe I would have become an actor. I was a very outgoing kid, but being in the hospital - being outside of social action for so long - turned me into an observer. Actually, right after I got out of the hospital, I did start writing a novel, but the book was so transparently about me that I stopped.
I ended up in Hampstead for two weeks after the Tour, visiting a hospital every day before my granddad died. But he was more than my granddad. He was like my father.
Sammy Sosa grew up without a father in the back of a converted public hospital in San Pedro de Macoris, a dusty seaside town in the Dominican Republic. His father, Juan Montero, died when Sosa was 5.
I moved to Harvard in 1998, and in 2000 the first kidney exchange in the United States was done at a hospital nearby. I started to think, 'Gee, there might be a way where I could help organize it, make it easier for people to find kidneys.'
If I am anorexic, I'd be in the hospital! I am tall. I am 5 foot 9 inches, 175 cms tall. I am lean, I am active and athletic. There are so many women who are naturally lean, and so am I. I have been like this for the longest time.
If you're having dinner with friends and they're always on the phone or always texting, it's just impolite. Unless it's something important - like someone is in the hospital or something - don't do it.
When I was in college, I worked at a state hospital that was a dumping ground for all manner of the criminally insane and 'mental defectives' as they called them back then. It was a horrible place, like Arkham, mostly in terms of total neglect of the inmates, so I wanted to write an Arkham story.
In the U.S., hospitals are rewarded for keeping hospital beds full. That's the market at work. The question is: should we work for the market, or should the market work for us?
I joke, but only half joke, that if you show up in an American hospital missing a finger, no one will believe you until they get a CAT scan, MRI and orthopedic consult.
When I was in the hospital they gave me apple juice every morning, even after I told them I didn't like it. I had to get even. One morning, I poured the apple juice into the specimen tube. The nurse held it up and said, 'It's a little cloudy.' I took the tube from her and said, 'Let me run it through again,' and drank it. The nurse fainted.
