When you are mute, you become a good listener - it's all one-way. You appreciate the written word. You appreciate the sound.

I don't have one or two. Do you have one?

So by the time I got to Michigan I was a stutterer. I couldn't talk. So my first year of school was my first mute year and then those mute years continued until I got to high school.

And it was the idea that you can do a play - like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever - and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life.

Two good talkers, not one good listener

Tony Judt's remarkable 'The Memory Chalet' was written from the prison of mute immobility.