Robert Gottlieb Quotes

I can't believe I've turned into a typical old man. I can't believe it. I was young just minutes ago.

I was in a bar and I said to a friend, 'You know, we've become those 40-year-old guys we used to look at and say, 'Isn't it sad?'

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

I used to love getting older.

I'm a lot older than I was when I was 30, which is kind of hard to believe.

You either mellow at 30, or your head explodes - take your choice.

When I see friends from school I think they've all grown old and I've stayed the same.

Those words are from Lynda Barry's novel 'Cruddy.' I've carried them with me for some time. There's a lot in my life I wasn't expecting. One is the realization that I stood at this pulpit and delivered a reading for my own graduation...15 years ago. Unexpectedly, I'm old.

The pleasures that once were heaven look silly at sixty-seven.

--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

When I was 18, I couldn't wait to move away. I was like: 'If I ever have to come back here, I'll kill myself.' Glasgow seemed like failure and death to me back then, but not any more.

You can't be 16 forever.

Looking back at my high school years, I'm struck by how slowly history can move.

I went a little nuts in my twenties, but I just turned thirty and I feel, like, older now.

When I was 14, I was the oldest I ever was. I've been getting younger ever since.

I've grown up a little bit. I'm almost 40 years old now. But everyone was introduced to me when I was 18 and I looked like I was 15. I've been around a long time.

I'm 36 years old, and I'm growing up. Little by little.

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

The older I get the better I used to be!

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

In thirteen years, every aspect of the universe can change - ask a thirteen-year-old.

One of the reasons for me that there's no 'Spaced 3' is that I don't think you can pretend to be 26 for ever.