Religion scholar Elaine Pagels in her memoir Why Religion? attributes a version of this statement to Mr. Twain, but I've also seen it credited to William Saroyan:"Everybody has to die, but I always thought in my case they'd make an exception."
I'll bet Woody Allen said it too, along with "I don't want to live on in an afterlife, I want to live on in my apartment."
Twain did say that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated, and “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” And "I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."
Twain made many other, more somber statements on the subject. “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Pagels had to deal with a double shot of unbearable grief, losing her young son one year and her husband, in a brutal hiking accident, the next. She says something I think Ruse, Hagglund, and several of the Neuroexistentialism contributors would agree with:
“What is clear is that meaning may not be something we find. We found no meaning in our son's death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning.”
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