About 40 years ago I drove off an embankment and tumbled down a huge hill. I was standing in the field with my car smashed like a can, saying, “Am I dead?” because I had seen myself dead in the car. Then someone said, “Are you OK?” and I didn’t have a scratch. I believe it was an angel experience.

Scuba diving in Costa Rica. My stunt double and I were trying out some equipment that let us talk to each other and I ran out of air at 80ft - probably because I talked too much. I had to use his air. Then we were surrounded by sharks. It was scary.

I fell off a ladder, landed on my back, got up and was fine.

In 2016, the moment my agent rang me to tell me I’d got the part of Hamlet for the RSC. While I was on the phone, I looked to my left and turned to the right, and a bus whizzed by and the wing mirror was so close to me that it knocked my hat off.

I think that loss of speech, and of understanding of speech, and of understanding of writing, and of coherent writing – these losses will amount to the loss of my mind. I know what this feels like and it has no insides, no internal echo. Mind means talking to oneself. There wouldn't be any secret mind surviving in me.

The mystery of summoning up words. Where are they in the mind, in the brain? They appear to be an agency from nowhere. They exist somewhere in our ground or in our air. They come from unknown darkness. From a place we normally don't think about.

It's not possible to get any distance from my project: being alive. Objectively, from the outside you might say, my life is terrible, unbelievable. And it's true, I hate this. I hate the way I am at the moment. But there is no objective view, I am here, in it, and there is nothing else, and this fact brings with it many things that make it of course easier. And beyond that there are many other things to think about.

For me, no word comes without prior thought. No sentence is generated without effort. No formulation is made automatically. I am faced continually with a mystery that other people have no conception of, the mystery of the generation of speech. There is no command situation, it goes back and back and back. Where the self lies at the heart of the utterance, the speaker generating the word, is always clouded. This is true for everyone, but for most people this is not something to think about. The generation of words is automatic. For me, that automatic link is broken. Word generation involves strain, guesswork, difficulty, imprecision.