"They had better give it to me now before I popped off"

I was impressed by 87-year old Doris Lessing's cantankerous reaction to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. After claiming that the Nobel Prize judges had told her in the sixties that they didn't like her, she comments:

"So now they've decided they're going to give it to me. So why? I mean, why do they like me any better now than they did then?"

and adding

"They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off."