I had a bad heart attack 20 years ago: I think I slid off the mortal coil for about 30 seconds.

I was an air display pilot for 15 years, and watched most of my friends die in crashes. When the children came along, I got out of it.

I was almost run over by a bus when I was 13. And in 1991, in the Gulf war, an Iraqi missile hit close to my house.

I went on a private jet with David Hasselhoff, and it was so turbulent between LA and Vegas I thought it was going down. I also thought: “The headline won’t be about me; it will be: David Hasselhoff and friend.”

For me, no word comes without prior thought. No sentence is generated without effort. No formulation is made automatically. I am faced continually with a mystery that other people have no conception of, the mystery of the generation of speech. There is no command situation, it goes back and back and back. Where the self lies at the heart of the utterance, the speaker generating the word, is always clouded. This is true for everyone, but for most people this is not something to think about. The generation of words is automatic. For me, that automatic link is broken. Word generation involves strain, guesswork, difficulty, imprecision.

The mystery of summoning up words. Where are they in the mind, in the brain? They appear to be an agency from nowhere. They exist somewhere in our ground or in our air. They come from unknown darkness. From a place we normally don't think about.

It's not possible to get any distance from my project: being alive. Objectively, from the outside you might say, my life is terrible, unbelievable. And it's true, I hate this. I hate the way I am at the moment. But there is no objective view, I am here, in it, and there is nothing else, and this fact brings with it many things that make it of course easier. And beyond that there are many other things to think about.

I think that loss of speech, and of understanding of speech, and of understanding of writing, and of coherent writing – these losses will amount to the loss of my mind. I know what this feels like and it has no insides, no internal echo. Mind means talking to oneself. There wouldn't be any secret mind surviving in me.