It makes you feel like you want to live.What is the worst job you’ve ever done? Doing the audiobook of the first book. It was hard. I couldn’t do that again.

Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good too.

Comforting, uplifting, all consuming.

A dizzy flamenco.

I’m walking down a street in New York, the sun is shining, I’m on my way to see friends who are chosen family—and I’ve just written a couple of pages that I like.

I haven’t done it yet.

I behaved badly with two old lovers. Years later, when I took one to lunch to apologise, it made it worse.

In my 30s, I was staring at a pair of expensive boots in a shop window when the photographer Gordon Parks came up behind me. He instantly understood, because he grew up even poorer than me; he made me buy them on my credit card.

Since hostile people still call me a former Playboy Bunny, even at 82, I probably shouldn’t have done that in my youth, even to write an exposé. And since a couple of times they’ve also referred to me as a former CIA agent, because I went to two Soviet-era communist youth festivals, I probably shouldn’t have done that, either. Yet if I hadn’t done both, I might have judged other people by such empty symbols, too.

Seeing the future die, from Bobby Kennedy to dear friends.