Ronald Searle(1920-2011)

In 1939 he began serving as a sapper with the 287 Field Company until he was captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore in 1942. He was held as a POW in Siam and Malaya until the war ended in 1945.

[referring to his imprisonment in Changi Prison, a Japanese Prisoner of War Camp, during World War II] If all your generation - everyone you knew - died when they were nineteen or twenty, you've got the biggest present in the world. You live from day to day thinking "My God, I should have died when I was nineteen and I'm eighty-five now". How many presents can one have in one's life? Every day is a present.