Actor Sam Neill revealed that he suffers from Hodgkin's lymphoma.
A year ago, the Jurassic Park star was diagnosed with stage three cancer.
"I'm sick, I'm dying," he thought.
Unable to film, he started writing to distract himself and give him a reason to get through the day, he tells the BBC.
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In the memoir "Have I Ever Told You This?", he writes about the disease and his nearly half-century-long career.
Neil first noticed that he had lumps on the glands in his neck while on tour for Jurassic World: Supremacy.
When doctors told him what was wrong, he said his reaction was "quite phlegmatic," but it made him "check everything out."
"I thought I had to do something and I thought, 'Should I start writing?'" he says.
"I didn't think of writing a whole book in myself, but just of putting some stories on paper. And everything was more interesting to me.
"A year later, not only did I write the book - I had no help - but it came out in record time.
"My publishers are wonderful people, but I think they wanted to release it as soon as possible, in case I died," says the actor.
Indeed, he added, at one point we thought the subtitle for the book might be Notes of a Dying Man.
There are, he says, "black days".
After the first round of chemotherapy, he lost his hair.
"When I look in the mirror I see a bald, withered, old man," he writes in his memoirs.
"More than anything, I want my beard back. I don't like the look of the face at all."
Hodgkin's lymphoma is a malignant disease of lymphocytic tissue that is characterized by swelling of characteristic cells, which leads to progressive enlargement of lymphatic tissue, most often lymph glands.
But the actor says he is now in remission and trying to stay positive.
"I am not afraid of death. What I don't want is to stop living, because I really enjoy life.
"I consider it an adventure, a rather dark adventure, but an adventure nonetheless. And the good days are just fantastic, and when you get good news, it's really exciting," he says.
His book is not about cancer, because, he says, he "can't stand" such things.
Instead, he mostly writes about a fun and amazing life and long career.
He starred in more than 70 films, working alongside Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and Jeff Goldblum.
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Murmuring and mumbling
He doesn't think acting has changed much, but he grumbles about mumbling - that is, actors who fail to get a line right.
"A lot of young actors seem to be whispering sexily, saying something that no one else can hear," he says.
Spilling the pearls
In the book, Neil travels "through the past and the alleys of his own life".
It was "a pleasure," he says.
He describes his co-star in The Piano, the American actor Harvey Keitel, as cruel and difficult and a bit rude.
Apparently, the love between Neil and Australian actress Judy Davis hasn't gone away.
They appeared in three films together, and the book says that she was the only actress who "made it clear to him that she was not in her league."
"Look," he adds, "I probably should have called this book 'The Spilling of Pearls.'
"One of them is meeting Barbra Streisand."
He was flown to meet her in a New York hotel suite in the early 1980s to discuss a role in her film Jentl.
Although, he says, he has always admired her, he admits: "I never enjoyed her singing".
So, when she sang not one, but two songs from the film, at full volume from a distance of about two meters from him, he was, he says, "in a state of shock and horror."
Neil is a man who didn't want to be James Bond, even though he auditioned for the role in the 1980s at the persuasive urging of his agent.
“I really didn't want to be a Bond that nobody liked.
"I didn't want the job at all because I'd be stuck with it for the rest of my life... I never wanted to be a celebrity."
The book ends with good news.
Although Neil still has to undergo chemotherapy, the tumors have disappeared.
Work on a new film in Australia with American Beauty star Annette Bening will soon begin.
He is currently acting in the series The Twelve.
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"The last thing I want is for people to obsess about cancer," says Neal, "because I don't really care about cancer."
"I don't really care about anything except living."
His book comes out on March 23.
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