Living with severe chronic pain, or forgetting the name of the person I’m interviewing.

Apathy, either from an audience, the people around me or myself.

I never want to go back; I fought so much through my life, that I have to keep going forward.

To let fear overcome my life. We’re not gonna let that happen because love is always greater than fear.

Feeling you want someone else’s welfare as much and sometimes more than your own.

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.

Being a salesgirl in a baby shop where the others said things like, “He’s Jewish, but she’s American.” Also, after college, being a waitress in London, and trying to make change in the old money of shillings and pence.

Dr Denis Mukwege, because he is to sexualised violence against females what Mandela was to apartheid.

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

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.