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" I once set myself a deadline: half a chapter a week, 20 minutes a day. The thought froze me instantly, like literary Botox. I returned to my non-schedule: sleeping, writing 20 minutes, and then back to sleep. Breakfast in bed, with juice congealing on the sill: pages and pages began to pour out again. "

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" There is a duality in recognising what an incredible disease it is - in terms of its origin, that it emerges out of a normal cell. It's a reminder of what a wonderful thing a normal cell is. In a very cold, scientific sense, I think a cancer cell is a kind of biological marvel. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Sense

Normal

Cold

" Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients. "

" Sidney Farber was a pathologist. He was called a doctor of the dead. He was a pathologist who sort of lived in the basement of the children's hospital in Boston, and he became very interested in childhood leukemia. And Farber began to inject this drug, aminopterin, into young kids, in order to see if he could get a remission. "

" Mary Lasker was an entrepreneur; she was a socialite. She was kind of a legendary networker. She became interested in saying, 'Well, you know, if these diseases don't have political support we'll never conquer them.' And she made, really, cancer her special cause. "

" 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. "

" Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for. "

" Cancer is not just a dividing cell. It's a complex disease: It invades, it metastasizes, it evades the immune system. "

" The trick to my writing, it turned out, was doing so exclusively in bed. The minute I even dared to discipline myself and write at the desk, I produced mounds of nonsense. Yet, sitting in bed, I wrote easily, effortlessly, fluidly. I became the master of perfect indiscipline. "

" My memory of my household is of one immersed in books and music. I have a very intimate relationship with Bengali literature, particularly Tagore, and my interest besides reading then was music. "

" Every era casts cancer in its own image. "

" In a spiritual sense, a positive attitude may help you get through chemotherapy and surgery and radiation and what have you. But a positive mental attitude does not cure cancer - any more than a negative mental attitude causes cancer. "

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

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

" I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India. "

" Nearly every one of the genes that turns out to be a key player in cancer has a vital role in the normal physiology of an organism. The genes that enable our brains and blood cells to develop are implicated in cancer. "

" A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weal test. Normals teach us rules; outliers teach us laws. For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias. "

" We now have poured in an enormous amount of resources into cancer. The National Cancer Institute Project, you know, runs about $5 billion a year. That's a large amount of money, but let's not be grandiose about the amount of money we're actually spending on a problem that is attacking us at the most fundamental level of the human species. "

" When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple. "

" One day, I had a patient who was going through chemotherapy who came to me and said, 'I'm going to go on with what I'm doing, but I need you to tell me what it is that I'm fighting.' "

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

" I think when we use 'stress', we are often using a kind of dummy word to try to fit many different things into one big category. "

" We may have to learn to live with cancer rather than die of it. It means a big change in our mindset and how we do research. We haven't quite reached there yet. "

" What we do in the laboratory is we try to design drugs that will not just eradicate cancer cells but will eradicate their homes. "

" Cancer is not one disease but many diseases. "

" Some cancers are curable, while others are highly incurable. The spectrum is enormous. Metastatic pancreatic cancer is a highly incurable disease, whereas some leukemia forms are very curable. There is a big difference between one form and another. "

" Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'. "

" Science is among the most profoundly human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanising effects of technology, science, in fact, remains our last stand against it. "

" I think the way we think about cancer, the way we treat cancer, has dramatically changed in the last century. There is an enormous amount of options that a physician can provide today, right down from curing patients, treating patients or providing patients with psychic solace or pain relief. "

" We don't know why, but pancreatic cancer has a very interesting physiological link to depression. There seems to be a deep link, and we don't know what it is. "

" 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. "