One thing I state as soon as we’re out of the door: ‘Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.’ I will not personify the cancer cells inside me in any form. I reject all metaphors of attack or enmity in the midst, and will have nothing whatever to do with any notion of desert, punishment, fairness or unfairness, or any kind of moral causality.

Read incorrectly, that sounds like a threat. No thanks, Vanity Fair !

It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death. ... I told my friends Kate and Allen, “I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.” “We’ll wheel you outside,” they said.

Like? I have no soft spot, fondness, admiration, respect, attraction, or esteem for death. I am not taken with it or infatuated by it. I carry no torch, have no crush, take no shine to the word or action of death. I don’t have the hots for it, and I don’t dig it, either.

Sundays in Paris with Jeffrey. We go to the Sunday market, make a nice lunch, drink a big bottle of Burgundy, and then take a long delicious nap. Heaven.

I worry that if I don’t challenge myself professionally I’ll lie on the sofa and watch old episodes of Law & Order all day.

Pain. I told Jeffrey that if I have a really bad headache just pull the plug.

Lying on the sofa watching old episodes of Law & Order all day.

That they want to be with me.