I am flattered and embarassed by all the recent attention to my "Last Lecture." I am told that, including abridged versions, over six million people have viewed the lecture online. The lecture really was for my kids, but if others are finding value in it, that is wonderful. But rest assured; I'm hardly unique. Send your kids to Carnegie Mellon and the other professors here will teach them valuable life lessons long after I'm gone.

As a good person.

I would just like to be remembered.

In the Sultan of Brunei’s will.

The idiocy of going to Skye from New Zealand in April 2020. All of a sudden, I’m turning on the news and hearing myself as an item. I have never been more mortified.

My kids, and getting some of the stories I had in my head on to paper in a way that wasn’t too far removed from the thing I dreamed about writing.

The only job I quit was, aged about 23, subediting a “men’s” magazine. My job was typing out readers’ pornographic fantasies. I started wishing people would reproduce by splitting down the middle.

Imaginative, dull, amiable.

And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.

I like the idea of being atoms that other people can breathe in, and fabulous worm food.