Julian Barnes

But he discovered if he took out the tube, then the cigarette fitted perfectly into the hole.

And all he had to do was to light up and inflate his lungs.

You've got to be pretty clever and curious to come up with that way of smoking, it seems to me.

I find it fascinating, really.

Yes.

I mean, I find it fascinating until I know exactly what it is.

And then I might find it horrifying.

I was talking to a friend of mine who said, oh, I don't think about death.

I'm only 60.

I'll think about death when it's nearer the time.

And you think, well, death doesn't quite necessarily operate in that fashion.

You know, death could be an out-of-control motorbike coming around a corner and taking you out.

You won't have had much time to think in those three seconds before it hits you.

One of my French gurus is the 17th century philosopher Montaigne, and he said we should think about death on a daily basis.

We should make it our familiar.

That's the best way of treating it, not as some awful sort of ghastly skeleton with a scythe in its hand coming to chop us off.

But we should think, he says, we should think of death

death when our horse shies or when a tile falls off the roof of a house.

We should make it sort of, we should almost domesticate it, tame it in this way.

And then we should hope to die while planting out our cabbages.