But if I was sitting in an armchair with bits and pieces of rubber sticking out of me and my son came over and said, you know, would you like a banana? Wink once for yes, wink twice for no, I dont think the interest of the conversation would get me past the sense that this is horrible. It's horrible for me but above all, horrible for them. There are things worse than death.

Did the Victorians fear death? As Death says in one of my own books, most men don't fear death, they fear those things – the knife, the shipwreck, the illness, the bomb – that proceed, by micro seconds if you're lucky and many years if you're not, the moment of death.

The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

I'm sort of - not looking forward to my final day - of course that's the wrong way to see it. But I'm kind of curious about it, and I'm happy and I'm ready. As Julian of Norwich said: "All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

some of the most noteworthy books I’ve read I guess, like A People’s History of the US, the Howard Zinn book totally changed the way I look at politics. And then in the same way I read a book recently called Sacred Economics that like totally changed the way I looked at economics.