I’m Irish. I think about death all the time.

Nicholson’s line plays as a darkly comic, self-mythologizing remark: he links an asserted Irish identity with a cultural stereotype of fatalism and a readiness to joke about mortality. Read less literally, it suggests a temperament shaped by awareness of impermanence—death as a constant background thought that can sharpen appetite for life, risk, and candor. The phrasing also functions as a performative persona statement: Nicholson often cultivated an image of sardonic toughness, and invoking death in an offhand way reinforces that stance. Because the claim rests on a broad ethnic generalization, its force is rhetorical rather than sociological—more about mood and attitude than about Irishness as fact.