I'm 58 years old and I just went through 8 back surgeries. They started cutting on me in February 2009 and I was basically bed ridden for almost two years. I got a real dose of reality that if you don't have your health you don't have anything.

Obama's health care plan will be written by a committee whose head John Conyers says he doesn't understand it. It'll be passed by Congress that has not read it signed by a president who smokes funded by a Treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese and financed by a country that's nearly broke. What could possibly go wrong?

Funny enough if you are looking at people these days who are putting Botox in their face and getting all sorts of plastic surgery we look at them and go I can tell you've had Botox. I can tell you've had plastic surgery. You look really strange to me. But no one's saying anything. We're just accepting the fact that they're strange-looking.

The words spoken by the leader of the free world can expand the frontiers of freedom or shrink them. When Ronald Reagan called on Gorbachev to 'tear down this wall ' a surge of confidence rose that would ultimately breach the bounds of the evil empire.

I'd make a terrible surgeon. The fear of blood? Very high on my list.

One thing I think celebrities shy away from is exposing the reality that we're all the same. Somebody's not more important because they have a Bentley or a big house or a famous boyfriend or plastic surgery - we're all the same.

The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books new ways of looking and seeing.

Yes I've been trepanned. That's quite an interesting experience especially for my brain surgeon who saw my thoughts flying around in my brain.

I have argued for years that we do not have a health care system in America. We have a disease-management system - one that depends on ruinously expensive drugs and surgeries that treat health conditions after they manifest rather than giving our citizens simple diet lifestyle and therapeutic tools to keep them healthy.

My dad's a doctor and when I was 8 I went to one of his medical conferences where they were demonstrating laser surgery on a chicken. I was so mad that a chicken had to die I never ate meat again.