It is that you know that you are standing out in this crowd because you are being carried on the shoulders of others. You know, you may have the capacity to articulate their aspirations. That is maybe something special you might have. But what is a leader without followers? I mean you would have all of these interviews and people will not — would not necessarily want to follow. No, I am a great believer in the fact that everything is corporate. Everything is corporate and you — as a leader you are one who can coax the best out of others.

If somebody doesn’t want to understand or see you that’s on them. You don’t have to carry that with you.

I think that is the most important lesson you learn in life, that you have to be ready to make a compromise. You do not compromise your principles, but you have to be ready to compromise. You have to understand that you cannot get your way 100 percent. Life is too complicated. You are not an island, and you work in a social setting, and you need to understand that you work always — at the family level, at the society level — to work out the compromise that is perceived to be fair. You don’t get 100 percent of what you want, but at least you will get the basic minimum that you require.

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

I would love to see more joy and fun and laughter and dance and expressiveness. People are very timid.

I would try to keep myself going by inventing games, and I would sing songs, a song beginning with “A,” “Always.” “Because,” “Charmaine,” “Daisy,” go through the alphabet. ... I would try to remember the states in the United States of America.

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.

What are we fighting for, if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms, including the sense of fun and capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world?

I want to give little Oliver as much daddy as I can while I’ve got strength. I want to make a movie. I’ve got a very strong movie in my head.

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.