My next course of action was to take my phone off the hook, because I kept getting obnoxious messages along the lines of, “Where’s that kidney?” and “You have to get to the hospital immediately!” and “He’s dead.

In February 1991, I was rushed to the hospital in Los Angeles to have my feet amputated. Three years earlier, I had broken the national 100 meters hurdles record while a student at UCLA and was a favourite for the event at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

I grew up outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a little town, and went to a regular high school. I was a… very average student in that high school. Then I joined the Navy, and while I was in the Navy, I was in a motorcycle accident and woke up deaf in a hospital.

America is layered with the given graffiti, names of its generous dead. There isn’t a museum or hospital, a theater or municipal amenity, however humble, that can’t be blessed with the remembrance of the comfortably-off and defunct. The money left to Ivy League universities in America isn’t about the needs of learning

Studios are like hospitals. A lot of people check in, and they don’t check out.

A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.

I must be the only person in the world who’s looking forward to going into hospital. I can’t wait to get it over and done with.

When radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it.

The defence budget is one of the very few elements of public expenditure that can truly be described as essential. This point was well-made by a robust Labour Defence Minister, Denis (Now Lord) Healey, many years ago: ‘Once we have cut expenditure to the extent where our security is imperiled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders.’

What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman, but what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to be, to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they’re not discriminated on the job.

Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

I’m not out there sweating for three hours every day just to find out what it feels like to sweat.

After two days in the hospital, I turn to the nurse.