This is obviously not how I wanted things to turn out, but my wife and I have no regrets; we did everything I could to maximize my odds. And we want to thank everyone who has so graciously helped us. The really weird part of all this is that I'm not depressed. I'm not in denial (I assure you, I am fully aware of what is going to happen), nor am I whistling in the dark, but after having felt crappy and sick for 11 months, to finally be fully healthy again is so exhilarating that it's a wonderful emotional buoy. So I am going to enjoy each day very fully, and play hard with my kids until I can't.

Let us consider me as a test case. As I have said, I would like to die peacefully with Thomas Tallis on my iPod before the disease takes me over and I hope that will not be for quite some time to come, because if I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.

what’s the difference? If I die in two years’ time, what will I do between now and then which I don’t want to do now? The main reason for living longer now is for the sake of my family and my wife. And this is not rationalist bravado entirely. I’ve had a wonderful life. Yes, I’ve done a lot of things I shouldn’t have done. But you know, I’ve had a full, complete life, and there’s nothing more I can do to complete it. Dying when you’re younger is obviously a totally different situation. Or losing a child. I mean, that’s beyond words.

Yeah. These books are all around me and they'll be here when I go and I'm that sick. I just don't know when it ends. But in 2010, I got really ill and leukaemia was one of the things I was diagnosed with and eventually it will switch me off. So it raises the question: what do you do? Do you lie down and give up? Read the Bible? Or do you go on as you were reading and writing. And I've done the second and I've just done a little bit called Latest Readings which is about the books I've been reading lately and I could do another volume of that because I'm still reading.

This is a lot harder for you than it is for me. If you had gone to bed as many nights as I did in the old days knowing that you had taken so much stuff that could kill you and not knowing if you would wake up, this is not as shocking as you think.

I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years. ... It's one of those phobias that didn't pay off. ... How much you're supposed to enjoy every sandwich.

Somebody who won't go to the doctor for a normal checkup is fearful and nervous. ... But once you find out what it's like on the other side, you can go beyond fear.

The songs aren't all written. ... You don't know where they're going to go. That's the fun of the job. There's the usual malarkey, the usual gags, the usual stuff. And also a few songs written by way of kind of being farewells to people, goodbyes to people, gratitude to people. Expressions of, you know, this was a nice deal, life. But I don't think it's exactly weighted with sentimentality.