Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient.

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

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.

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

A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.

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.

Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering.