"I think cancer in many ways to those of us alive today is similar to what tuberculosis was like in the 19th century. It’s so unfair: It takes the young, it takes the old. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die. And it’s very difficult to make sense of the reasons why it may go one way or another. It’s very, very difficult to imagine it as anything other than just cruel and cold and capricious. And that makes it difficult to imagine the universe as anything other than cold and capricious. And I wanted to be honest about that, because I wanted [Hazel and Augustus] to have to face, in the most desperate way, that overwhelming question, as T.S. Eliot called it, of how we’re going to organize our lives and what they’re going to mean."