‚Unforgiven‘ is probably an example of a script that I liked right away but thought, ‚This is great, but I’d like to do this when I’m older.‘ So I stuck it in the drawer for ten years and then took it out.

The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.

You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.

We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.

I don’t have anything to say about other people’s art and their work.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

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.

I’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.

I love good film, whether it’s an independent or studio film. The independent films, I think the good ones aren’t necessarily eccentric ones but they’re the more specific ones.

If my life was a movie, no one would believe it.

Aging can be fun if you lay back and enjoy it.

I’ve choreographed all of my movies.

My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn’t need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.

Making a film is like putting out a fire with sieve. There are so many elements, and it gets so complicated.

If you look at me in ‚Ride Along,‘ even though I’m playing two different characters, my demeanor and my tone were not aggressive.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

Songwriters, you have to work – you have to wait for residuals. You have to pray that the song’s going to be a hit. And then a year later, you might get a check.

Don’t get old, if you can avoid it.

I felt like I had a really bad case of writer’s block… Music is so therapeutic for me that if I can’t get it out, I start feeling bad about myself – a lot of self-loathing.

I think if you make a good movie, people walk away arguing.

The older you get, the better you get.

Dressing up is a bore. At a certain age, you decorate yourself to attract the opposite sex, and at a certain age, I did that. But I’m past that age.

I think it would be interesting if old people got anti-Alzheimer’s disease where they slowly began to recover other people’s lost memories.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

I have certain signatures, certain cutting principles. It could be a raw-edged seam; it could be leaving the lining of sheepskin exposed so it’s not perfectly finished. I invent new ways to do it, but the end goal is always the same.

You know you’re getting old when you get that one candle on the cake. It’s like, ‚See if you can blow this out.‘

I want to make a good, solid kung fu movie.

When I was making the early stuff, I never expected it to be so big. I was in my own kind of bubble. I never wanted to tour; I just wanted to create music and make a diary I could put out into the world. And sometimes, I became the characters.

I put out tapes, but I always kept saying, ‚Why am I putting all this energy into these tapes?‘ I was like, ‚I’d rather make just an album because I have a vision; I know how I want to do my records.‘ I always felt like an artist as well.

I couldn’t have written things like ‚Low‘ and ‚Heroes,‘ those particular albums, if it hadn’t have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

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.

As I got older, I guess I became more mellow and more forgiving and more loving.

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

Worry – a God, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair gray.

I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, ‚No. No, I’m finished. Bye.‘ And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that.

Our life before moving to Washington was filled with simple joys… Saturdays at soccer games, Sundays at grandma’s house… and a date night for Barack and me was either dinner or a movie, because as an exhausted mom, I couldn’t stay awake for both.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

You can’t remember the plot of the Dr Who movie because it didn’t have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.

I’m so old, I don’t buy green bananas any more.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know you.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

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

I could imagine at a certain age, when I have no vocal cords left, that I would find a young man who could sing my parts for me. But I don’t see why I would stop.

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.

For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

Feels good to try, but playing a father, I’m getting a little older. I see now that I’m taking it more serious and I do want that lifestyle.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

So many writers don’t like to write… I like to write, and sometimes I’m afraid I like it too much, because when I get into work, I don’t want to leave it. And as a result, I’ll go for days and days and days without leaving my house.

How young can you die of old age?

I can write a song in about an hour if it’s a simple country song.

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

Wrinkles will only go where the smiles have been.

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

Probably the reason it’s a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you’re getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you’re going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there’s a kind of bundle.

When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

Starting at about, I guess, forever, I’ve always looked forward to getting older. When I was 14, I couldn’t wait to be 16 and get a driver’s license.

We should all start to live before we get too old.