Paul Reiser Quotes

When I was at drama school, I wanted to change the world, and thought I had some great wisdom to impart to people about humanity. Now that I'm older, I know enough to realise that I know nothing at all.

I'm a much better mother at 46... than if I were like, 21 or 25.

As I get older, I get smaller. I see other parts of the world I didn't see before. Other points of view. I see outside myself more.

You just realize that you don't know everything there is to know. The older I get, the less I know, and that's a good thing. When I was young, I knew everything, and everything wasn't necessarily good.

At 30 I thought I knew everything, and 30 years later I didn't know anything.

When I was younger, I took everything seriously, and I still do to some degree.

Age gives you a great sense of proportion. You can be very hard on yourself when you're younger but now I just think 'well everybody's absolutely mad and I'm doing quite well'.

One wouldn't want to have the same dilemmas at 50 as one had at 15. And indeed I don't. I have a very different take on life.

At the age of 60, I am less experimental and more mature. I want most of all to convey my understanding of life.

Life is not quantifiable in terms of age, but I suppose in my fifties I am more grounded and more at ease in my own skin than when I was younger. I have a confidence that I didn't have before from the experiences I've had.

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.

The thing that's changed the way I do my stand-up act is having kids and getting older and wiser and smarter. There might be a joke or two in the past that I wish I hadn't done, but in the past, you can't have it back.

Whether it's 18 years old or 40 years old, we think we know what's going on. But if you're lucky enough to continue the journey, its amazing how we keep learning how much we didn't know.

I guess the older I get, the more understanding and forgiving I've become.

I think I've become more modest as the years have gone on.

Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it; perhaps we even deserve it. But we don't acquire wisdom from it.

You see things differently at 40 than you do at 31. Especially if you got to 40 the way I did.

So, do I think I'm missing something? I really don't, and I think that comes with age.

What I've observed and what I've imagined - and definitely what I'm hoping - happens as you get older is that there's a mellowing, an acceptance that comes with time. I guess that I'll find out.

What teens will realize is always a mystery to me. I'm still realizing so many things myself, very belatedly, that it seems unwise to think I have any right to be showing people things in hopes that they'll realize them.

The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.

Life experiences can, at times, be quite humbling, but you learn from them. But I like the changes in my life and what kind of person they've made me into. I'm very open, not as judgmental as I was in my twenties, and a lot more compassionate.

When you're older and wiser a lot of the ego has gone out of the window.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

As you age, you have this vast cauldron of experience to draw from. Some of the experiences are great; some of them you wish you'd never had. But all of them shape the work that you do and the person you become. It's just inevitable.