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

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

If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.

Cancer has enormous diversity and behaves differently: it's highly mutable, the evolutionary principles are very complicated and often its capacity to be constantly mystifying comes as a big challenge.

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'.

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

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