One thing I state as soon as we’re out of the door: ‘Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.’ I will not personify the cancer cells inside me in any form. I reject all metaphors of attack or enmity in the midst, and will have nothing whatever to do with any notion of desert, punishment, fairness or unfairness, or any kind of moral causality.

Don't screw it up. Don't take it for granted. Try new things, even if you're old. Do the right thing, because if you do the right thing, the money will follow. Decide what you stand for. Finally, don't worry about being cool—be warm.

I feel uncomfortable being the spokesperson or face of athlete mental health as it's still so new to me and I don't have all the answers. I do hope that people can relate and understand it's O.K. to not be O.K., and it's O.K. to talk about it. There are people who can help, and there is usually light at the end of any tunnel.

So any student who wants to get into psychology, right now the students are like lemmings. They say, “Well, it’s popular to study brain science, I’ll do that.” Or, “It’s popular to do neural networks; I see 30,000 people doing it, it must be good.” And my advice is if a lot of people are doing it, don’t waste your time.

Bad things happening to my children and grandchildren.

What makes life worth living are the saints I meet-they can be long-time friends or someone I meet on a street. They find a way to behave decently in an indecent society.

What makes life worth living are the saints I meet-they can be long-time friends or someone I meet on a street. They find a way to behave decently in an indecent society.

Fine, thank you. I am quite recovered. It was almost a near-death experience. Things weren't going so well for a little while, but I feel strong again.

I don’t know. When I was a soldier I just didn’t want to be hurt. I hoped it wouldn’t hurt. So I suppose painlessly because I hate pain and I love sleep.

I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.