When I was 19, my boss in the circus – I worked in the circus for 10 years. I was, like, a ringleader, MC of a circus – and my boss at the circus really cared about me and she said, "I read this book called 'Awaken the Giant Within' by Tony Robbins.

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.

In history I decided to begin with Gibbon. Someone had told me that my father had read Gibbon with delight; that he knew whole pages of it by heart, and that it had greatly affected his style of speech and writing. So without more ado I set out upon the eight volumes of Dean Milman's edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . I was immediately dominated both by the story and the style. All through the long glistening middle hours of the Indian day, from when we quitted stables till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour of Polo, I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all.

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.

Well, I’m in the midst of writing 1,000 handwritten, personalized thank you notes to readers of my books. It’s simultaneously a major pain in the butt — it’s taking me several weeks — and also delightful. I feel like I’m getting to know the readers of my books, which is great, since writers often have a solitary existence.

Being willing to listen to my ideas and tell me when they are good and when they are dumb.

That is a good question. Well, one thing I do love is my elastic shoelaces. ... So, you just replace the cloth shoelaces with these elastic… I think it’s called “Lace Lock” is the brand I use. And, yeah, shoelaces seem like such 18th century technology.

I was the answer to one across in the Dec. 26, 2017, New York Times crossword puzzle.

So words are my true love. But I grew to love all these other genres, including jigsaws, which I was very snobby about and looked down on. I was, ‘They’re not real puzzles.’ But I am a reformed jigsaw skeptic. I can officially say I am now a jigsaw lover.

To me, part of what I love about puzzles is that they fuel my curiosity and I’d say curiosity and gratitude are my two favorite virtues. My last book was about gratitude; this book is all about curiosity. Curiosity is what drives puzzlers. They’re like, ‘Why is it? What is it?’