“I understand that smoking is vaguely inappropriate in certain situations. You know, like an orphanage, cancer ward, whatever.”

“Cancer seems a high price to pay for an innocuous-looking habit. You get into smoking and you are robbed of the last 25 years of your life. Some cocky souls will say, 'Ah yes, but they are the worst 25 years.' Nobody feels like that in a cancer ward. There are no cocky souls in a cancer ward. But there's a lot of pain, not just of the excruciating physical kind that they shoot you full of morphine to smother. There are a lot of tears. All round. It is hard to say goodbye to the people you love. And it's scary. Cancer wards have a way of knocking the cockiness out of you. And for what? Another cigarette?”

“Does Hallmark make a “Sorry I tried to drink your blood and touched you in a vaguely inappropriate manner” card? I settled for “How much do you remember?”

“You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.”

“Having an energy conversation without talking about climate is like talking about smoking and not talking about cancer.”

“Man, it was a good thing vampires didn't get cancer. Lately he'd been chain-smoking like a felon.”