Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.

Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.

Could your medicine be a cell, not a pill? Could your medicine be an organ that's created outside the body? Could your medicine be an environment?

This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.

I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first instinct was to withdraw from what was going on - the complexity, the death. It was a very bleak time.

All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.