I am a scientist and I am a physician. So I write papers.

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

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

I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?