If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

The quip compresses Asimov’s public persona—prolifically productive, wryly rational, and impatient with self-pity—into a single image: even imminent death would merely change his typing speed. It treats time as the ultimate scarce resource and frames “brooding” as an unproductive indulgence compared with making something. The joke also implies a kind of secular consolation: meaning is found in work, curiosity, and output rather than in melodrama. As a piece of authorial self-mythology, it reinforces the legend of Asimov as a writer who met life (and its limits) with humor and relentless intellectual activity.