Because I work on leukemia, the image of cancer I carry in my mind is that of blood. I imagine that doctors who work on breast cancer or pancreatic cancer have very different visualizations. Siddhartha Mukherjee Read Quote
Cancer is not just a dividing cell. It’s a complex disease: It invades, it metastasizes, it evades the immune system. Siddhartha Mukherjee Read Quote
The idea that cancer genes are sitting inside each and every one of our chromosomes, just waiting to be corrupted or inactivated and thereby unleashing cancer, is, of course, one of the seminal ideas of oncology. Siddhartha Mukherjee Read Quote
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.’ Siddhartha Mukherjee Read Quote
Robert Sandler is a child who died when he was three years old, and he is a child who was the first child that we know of to be treated with chemotherapy. Siddhartha Mukherjee Read Quote
Why did I write ‘The Emperor of All Maladies?’ A 56-year-old woman with an abdominal sarcoma, having undergone two remissions and a relapse, asked me to describe what she was battling. By the time I had finished answering her, I realised that I had written 600 pages. Siddhartha Mukherjee Read Quote
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. Siddhartha Mukherjee Read Quote
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. Siddhartha Mukherjee Read Quote
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. Siddhartha Mukherjee Read Quote
