As I’ve gotten older, my goals have become more solidified. My main concentration is on the welfare of the people I’ve worked with in the Himalayas and on human welfare in general. I’m also extremely interested in the environment and trying to encourage people to be more concerned about what we’re doing to our world. Now I’m just one of thousands and thousands of people who have these same views these days. I think this is one of the great steps forward we’ve seen in modern decades — the considerable growing interest that people have in the environment and in keeping it reasonably clean and wholesome. I certainly hope it remains that way.

I need to do more whale-watching. I must learn to play the guitar. I would like to play Uncle Vanya, King Lear and a panto Dame. The icing on that cake would be if they were all in the same season.

When Jeff Zaslow's column appeared in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), about a dozen publishers emailed me, asked if I would be willing to write a book based on it. (I found this laughable, since at the time the palliative chemo was not yet working, and I thought I was down to about 6 weeks of good health). When the palliative chemo started working and we had some breathing room, I mentioned this to Jai, and she told me she wanted to do it. She was, in fact, quite emphatic. We had always talked about my "writing the manual" for her and the kids in my remaining time, and Jai felt that if it were a "real" project, I might take it much more seriously.

Unfortunately I have too many projects going. Two of them, fortunately, are already in the editors’ hands. One is this book on the birds of Northern Melanesia I’m doing with Jared Diamond, and that deals with speciation and particular ecology, biogeographic dispersal and all the other questions.

It’s art that influenced me while I was in exile – Dumile Feni’s work.

Monday to Friday, very, very industriously from ten in the morning ’til about six in the evening, I just sat and wrote, and revised and revised, and wrote.

But there’s nothing like that quality of leading a decent, dignified life, meeting up with other people who have similar ideals, expressing kindness and love and curiosity and challenging and argument and the excitement of ideas. Ideas can be marvelous.

And when I spoke once, very recently, about African artists, you were resistant to that idea of African art. The Africans who are artists, but they're artists, they were artists.

I think of two great personalities who were locked up in the prison where we’ve now built the Constitutional Court: Gandhi and Mandela.

Monday to Friday, very, very industriously from ten in the morning ’til about six in the evening, I just sat and wrote, and revised and revised, and wrote.