It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.

Probably the most important reason we are seeing more cancers than before is because the population is ageing overall. And cancer is an age-related disease.

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.

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

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

I wanted to explore cancer not just biologically, but metaphorically. The idea that tuberculosis in the 19th century possessed the same kind of frightening and decaying quality was very interesting to me, and it seemed that one could explore the idea that every age defined its own illness.

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