From The Talks:
You are going to make every moment count. I mean, you better make every moment count. Live your life now; start in the morning. You mustn’t sit around waiting to die. When it happens you should come into the cemetery on a motorbike, skid to a halt by the side of the coffin, jump in and say: “Great I just made it.”
So death doesn’t scare the hell out of you?
Well I always get worried when people say to me, “Oh we’re having a retrospective of your work.” I always think it’s sort of a threat. You know, hurry up and die. So I always get a bit worried when those things happen and that makes me think of death, but I’m a stubborn bastard.
You just refuse to think about it too much?
You quite often see these middle aged people on television who’ve won the fight against cancer and now they want to live their lives differently and enjoy every moment. Before they just went along and now they’ve had this scare that they were going to die. I had that scare that I was going to die when I was nineteen when I was a soldier, so I have been living my life that way for sixty years now.
What happened to you as a soldier that made you appreciate every moment?
I was a soldier in Korea and I got into a situation where I knew I was going to die – like the people know they are going to die of cancer, except then we got out of it. But it lasted with me – I was nineteen. That formed my character for the rest of my life. The rest of my life I have lived every bloody moment from the moment I wake up until the time I go to sleep.
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