Siddhartha Mukherjee Writing Quotations

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

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'.

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?

Sandeep Jauhar’s Doctored is a passionate and necessary book that asks difficult questions about the future of medicine. The narrative is gripping, and the writing is marvelous. But it was the gravity of the problem—so movingly told—that grabbed and kept my attention throughout this remarkable work.

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

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