A Quote by John Mortimer

Like childhood, old age is irresponsible, reckless, and foolhardy. Children and old people have everything to gain and nothing much to lose. It's middle-age which is cursed by the desperate need to cling to some finger-hold halfway up the mountain, to conform, not to cause trouble, to behave well.
It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.
Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending; a negligent youth is usually attended by an ignorant middle age, and both by an empty old age.
It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary... to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
...it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs.
They think I'm too old to cause trouble. Old age is a powerful disguise.
I think if a physician wrote on a death certificate that old age was the cause of death, he'd be thrown out of the union. There is always some final event, some failure of an organ, some last attack of pneumonia, that finishes off a life. No one dies of old age.
We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of thier old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.
It’s the age of celebrity. It’s the age of social media. But for we old school girls who don’t want to show up at every single event just ‘cause I don’t tweet–I have nothing to say. I’m not on Facebook. I mean it sounds like I have plenty to say, but that’s to people who I’m in a room with. I’m not that interesting, and the rest is none of your business.
Old age is never honored among us, but only indulged, as childhood is; and old men lose one of the most precious rights of man,--that of being judged by their peers.
Well, let's remember that one of the things that the open borders side always says is, 'Oh, they're just children.' No... the median age is 25 of a DACA illegal alien, and they can be up to 36 years old and still be getting the amnesty, and they claim to have come in before the age of 16, so first of all they are not children.
You know what makes me feel old? When I see girls who are 20-something, or the new crop of actresses, and I think, Aren't we kind of the same age? You lose perspective. Or being offered the part of a woman with a 17-year-old child. It's like, "I'm not old enough to have a 17-year-old!" And then you realize, well, yeah, you are.
The great enemy of creativity is fear. When we're fearful, we freeze up - like a nine-year-old who won't draw pictures, for fear everybody will laugh. Creativity has a lot to do with a willingness to take risks. Think about how children play. They run around the playground, they trip, they fall, they get up and run some more. They believe everything will be all right. They feel capable; they let go. Good businesspeople behave in a similar way: they lose $15 million, gain $20 million, lose $30 million and earn it back. If that isn't playing, I don't know what is!
I didn't fear old age. I was just becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the only people who said old age was beautiful were usually twenty-three years old.
Well, we certainly need to raise the retirement age. I've told my 19-year-old and my 22-year-old that they're not going to be getting retirement benefits at age 62.
Such a strange thing, to hold a six-year-old's hand. Especially a six-year-old you've only just met. A toddler will grab hold of your finger, and someone your own age will clasp on to your whole hand, but with six-year-olds it's something in between, this acknowledgment that they can't be the one to take hold, so you have to do all the holding, folding your hand around theirs, feeling so much bigger and responsible.
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