As devastatingly talented, gorgeous and wise, but I’m not betting on it.

My vain side would like to be remembered as someone who did good for others in some way. But I would be happy if my children remembered me.

Kind, fun and that I cared.

It’s here. I’ve always thought that it was here. If you play to the gallery, that’s posterity. The best you can hope for is another gallery after you’ve gone, but you won’t see it. Statistically, it’s unlikely that much of what one does will be read for ever. It may just be one or two poems. For example, my Japanese Maple poem is famous among people who own a Japanese maple.

The one is, to me, the question of conscience is number one. It comes before food. You can survive on almost anything, but your dignity depends on your conscience.

Monday to Friday, very, very industriously from ten in the morning ’til about six in the evening, I just sat and wrote, and revised and revised, and wrote.

I’d been introduced to Freud through all this because I couldn’t understand why is it so difficult to be brave. There was something inside me that wanted to collaborate all the time with the people who wanted to destroy me, and I was searching for it, and I found there was a thing called the unconscious that everybody has. And you’ve got to be in touch with the unconscious to understand a lot of your behavior. And I read through volume after volume after volume of the collected works of Sigmund Freud.

And into the darkness I said, “What happened?” and a woman’s voice said, “It was a car bomb,” and I collapsed into darkness again, but with a sense of euphoria. I’d survived.

But there’s nothing like that quality of leading a decent, dignified life, meeting up with other people who have similar ideals, expressing kindness and love and curiosity and challenging and argument and the excitement of ideas. Ideas can be marvelous.

We haven’t crossed the frontier of unemployment, of poverty, of dispossession, of landlessness, of homelessness, of lack of access to health, to education, all those different things. We just have to keep going steadily, steadily, to plan well, to involve the people and not simply deliver things from the top and hope that people will be grateful, and get upset when they’re not grateful.