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

It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy

There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.

One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.

It felt—nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos—that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer.

There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'.

If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.