Well, I think the most single important issue today is to make sure that nuclear weapons will not proliferate beyond the eight, or nine, countries that already have nuclear weapons; and absolutely make sure that none of these nuclear weapons or this nuclear material will fall into the hands of any extremist or terrorist group, because if they got hold of this material, they would use it. That would be the beginning of the end for civilisation as we know it.

So a great deal has changed, but we in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission said, “Watch it. You can kiss reconciliation and forgiveness goodbye, unless the gap between the rich and the poor — the haves and the have-nots — is narrowed, and narrowed quickly and dramatically.” So yes, we face very, very considerable problems.

I think most of our major challenges are not going to be in the physical field at all. I think they’re going to be in the field of human relations, of getting on with each other, of contributing. People accepting that they have to contribute something, their thoughts, their ideas, maybe even their money, towards producing a world society that is perhaps a little bit more honest and reasonable than it is now.

There are many battles. There’s so much that needs to be done. We need to protect the environment. Save this little planet. Not just this little piece of real estate we call America, but save the planet.

The second, probably, and I didn’t talk about it in my book, which is always interesting to me, because it didn’t come up within a lesson, okay, within the book teaching me a lesson, but the second was Don Quixote. And that ties in so much to the optimistic part of me, this idea of tilting at windmills, whether they’re real or not. The imagination of them, what fueled that man, that love, that idyllic sort of quest. That can be life sometimes. We don’t always achieve what we end up hoping for. We can work very, very hard at things and come up short. But I take comfort from having dreamt the dream. From having taken the steps, the quest, to undergo the quest of trying to reach them. If at the end you don’t, you’ve had the journey, and I always think the journeys are valuable. They give you lessons, they give you memories. They help you meet people, they help you have an adventure in life. And so for me, that probably, when I’ve read that book, I understood that I was okay. Being optimistic wasn’t a bad thing. It was actually a very good thing.

My diabetes. You couldn’t go into law enforcement [with that illness]. Now I believe in some police forces you can do that. It wasn’t possible back then. But for a then-8-year-old to have my ambition — my dream — destroyed, broke my heart.

Find the friends who do that. Find the friends who never tell you that you can’t do it, but who point you in the right direction, hold you when you fail, and push you when you need the push. Those are hard friends to value sometimes, but they are the best of friends.

Because I have to read everything I write and edit it. So I’m not a natural writer. She’s more a natural writer than I am. But I can do what I need to do to give myself enough time to write papers, edit them, before I turn them in.  And that’s what I still do.

Well, what's very interesting is that those people read our opinions which can be, at moments, rather animated. An animated exchange in writing among the justices. And many people who read our opinions think we have to be at each other's necks constantly. It's interesting we're not. When we're talking about cases at our conference it's generally a conversation. It's really a talk about what our perspectives are and why we have reached the conclusions we've reached.

Never give up. No matter how hard the challenge might be, no matter how hard a moment might be in one’s life, there is still hope. From every failure I’ve had, I’ve learned a lesson that has propelled me to something else that has actually been better than whatever I thought I could never get over.