I would have to take longer than a minute to give my whole synopsis of my life, but I want to let you know that all of us should be free and equal and have equal opportunity and that is what I’m trying to instill and encourage and inspire young people to reach their highest potential.

It could really have an impact if I get it right. Something that will get the next generation to see there is a way to think about politics that is not just the way we've been habituated to do it. I care about that and I think I can do it.

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.

As far as the Carter Center's concerned, I would like to see guinea worm completely eradicated before -- before I die. I'd like for the last guinea worm to die before I do. ... I think right now, we have 11 cases. We started out with 3.6 million cases. And I think we have two cases in South Sudan and one case in Ethiopia and one case in Mali and seven cases in Chad. That's all the guinea worms in the world, and we know where all of them are. So obviously, that would be my top priority.

But Larkin was different. He knew it would end in silence, and he was afraid of the silence. He didn’t like the idea of not being here. I’m not like that – and my death might come as a relief to quite a few people. I’d rather like it not to hurt, that’s all.

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.

I think I actually wrote it in one of my poems is that my decline has been the making of me - I forget how I put it. Yeah, simply more reflective. I haven't got the excuse of moving forward just on impulse anymore, which I did, I think, for a long, long time.

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.

One thing, it's too big a subject and I want to talk about it on paper if I talk about it at all. But I can say this much, because I thought the life that my father and mother would have had together was cut short and something of what they might have achieved I hope that I'm achieving in my work.

What I’ve got doesn’t hurt. I’ve been lucky. The treatment has been benign. I don’t know if I could concentrate if I was in pain. I’ve never had to stop.