I woke up this morning thinking maybe I don’t want to be an actor any more, then I had breakfast and I thought: actually, no, I really like being an actor.

When I now think of how the uncertainty about my own future, and the proximity of death, threw me into torment, careering wildly between hope and despair, I look back in wonder at how little I thought about the effect I had on my own patients after I had spoken to them. I did worry that if my tone of voice was too pessimistic the poor patient might spend what little time they had left feeling deeply depressed, simply waiting to die. So I tried to find a balance between telling them the truth and not depriving them of hope. After a patient died, I only occasionally heard back from the family, so I had little way of knowing whether the way I had spoken to them was appropriate or not.

Six months ago, I decided to move house. I got a skip, cleared everything out and then thought: “Why am I doing this?” So I remained, and I’m glad I did.

I used to use the brush before that time before 2015, but then I gave it up for a while. Now I’m back on the brush, so that’s the truth.

Well, you know, the genotype. I'll mention something that nobody ever mentions. Let's say you have now a genotype that makes a certain protein. And that protein, and you can see this in every issue of Science practically, that protein is a very complex structure, incredibly complex. Now how that step from a group of amino acids to that polypeptide [happens] is an enormous jump. I think right now everybody leaves it alone because nobody yet has figured out just exactly how to attack this problem.

No sir. I'm rather dismayed how many days I have to work on my willpower very strongly in order to get out of bed before 8 o'clock.…I write letters, I write manuscripts, in addition to the book that is in press I have two manuscripts that are going to be published some time this or next year, and I have a whole list of manuscripts that I would like to write.

There's only one thing where I… if I had the opportunity to live my life over again where I probably would make a change.…I think if I had shortened that period and had earlier begun to work on basic evolutionary theory on history of biology and particularly on the philosophy of biology, I could have achieved some things which now I will never be able to achieve because at age 93, one knows that one doesn't live forever.

Unfortunately I have too many projects going. Two of them, fortunately, are already in the editors’ hands. One is this book on the birds of Northern Melanesia I’m doing with Jared Diamond, and that deals with speciation and particular ecology, biogeographic dispersal and all the other questions.

I always think about things, and if something puzzles me… Well, that of course was one of Darwin’s secrets. Whenever something puzzled him, he tried find a theory. He made a conjecture, as (Karl) Popper would call it, and see if it worked out and that’s true even today.

Very often I had to fight for the recognition of my ideas, particularly since, in those earlier days, I wasn’t in any prominent position where people would listen to me.