The best of times, the worst of times.

Like I've been kidnapped of my senses.

Friendly and warm.

Your heart walking around outside your body.

I would love to have a good memory. I’m at an age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.

In my 30s, I was staring at a pair of expensive boots in a shop window when the photographer Gordon Parks came up behind me. He instantly understood, because he grew up even poorer than me; he made me buy them on my credit card.

Since hostile people still call me a former Playboy Bunny, even at 82, I probably shouldn’t have done that in my youth, even to write an exposé. And since a couple of times they’ve also referred to me as a former CIA agent, because I went to two Soviet-era communist youth festivals, I probably shouldn’t have done that, either. Yet if I hadn’t done both, I might have judged other people by such empty symbols, too.

As someone who left the world around me a little kinder and less hierarchical.

I behaved badly with two old lovers. Years later, when I took one to lunch to apologise, it made it worse.

Seeing the future die, from Bobby Kennedy to dear friends.