Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

Adults are obsolete children.

In the nineties, everybody wants to talk about their rights and privileges. Twenty-five years ago, people talked about their obligations and responsibilities.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

When I reached 80, my world turned upside down physically. I’ve had a lot of physical problems.

I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don’t retire before I go senile, then I’ll do more damage than good at that point.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

Loving someone liberates the lover as well as the beloved. And that kind of love comes with age.

Relationships are the hallmark of the mature person.

I don’t blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout. I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they’ll realize there’s more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously.

Although I’m only fourteen, I know quite well what I want. I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child. I feel quite independent of anyone.

The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.

I’m getting a wrinkle above my eyebrow because I just can’t stop lifting it, and I love that you know.

I am a child but I have to think and act like a woman, this business forces you to.

Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.

We need an adult in the White House. When making life-or-death, war-or-peace decisions, a president can’t just pop off or lash out irrationally.

I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.

It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God’s waiting room.

The older you get, the better you get.

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

I like the city. I like the concrete. I like big business. I like being a CEO of my own company and having a lot of responsibilities. At the same time, when I can go off with a backpack or off on a surfboard or even off on a run somewhere in the woods – that’s where I’m really happy.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.

A grown man should always carry cash, right? I don’t know who told me, but someone told me that a long time ago, and the biggest turnoff is when a guy doesn’t have cash on him.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

I want at least five kids. I want twins.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long.

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

Too many people treat parenting like it’s the 20th item on their to-do list.

I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and look after my family. I love what I do, but it’s not where it begins and ends.

Children make your life important.

With increasing age, dullness of mind and heart sets in.

I’m very at ease, and I like it. I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me. I’m rather surprised at who I am, because I’m actually like my dad!

I wrote my first song at 12 and remember someone asking, ‚What were you going through at 12 that you could write about?‘ I get what you’re saying, but 11, 12, 13 were the hardest years of my life. You learn everything. You learn how horrible things feel.

As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I’ve got left?

My grandfather lived to be late 90s on one side and on the other side, 70s or something. And my father died young, at 63. But he didn’t take very good care of himself.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.

I’m sure I’ve changed my mind about something. Inevitably, when we grow up – as we get more experience and wiser. Well, I’ve changed my mind about some food that I didn’t like when I was young.

How do I confront aging? With a wonder and a terror. Yeah, I’ll say that. Wonder and terror.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.

I’ve been running a full marathon every year for more than 20 years, and my record is getting worse. Getting older, getting worse. It’s natural.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

Most women in my family start to get sick and start dying in their 40s, and I am going to be very happy to become 50 and 60. I love getting older.

You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.

A good wife is one who serves her husband in the morning like a mother does, loves him in the day like a sister does and pleases him like a prostitute in the night.

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.

The thing I want more than anything else? I want to have children. I used to feel for every child I had, I would adopt another.