Ian Mckellen Quotes

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

One day, at my office, I wrote down some names and dates and notes, and I wrote a title, 'The Age of Despair,' and then some other 'Ages' - Innocence, God, Reason, Hope - and I wrote this as well: 'Woman, born in 1930, lives till the age of 80 or so, suffers depression, marries a car dealer, has children who grow up to confuse her.'

I never spent much time with people my own age.

I have to get out once a week and speak with people or I start thinking I'm the emperor of Abyssinia.

Solitude is pleasant. Loneliness is not.

By the time I'm 40, interplanetary travel will be common. Nobody will want to talk to me at that age, anyway.

There was a time when people had the decency to wait until they were approaching 50 to have a mid-life crisis. Now it seems many thirtysomethings find themselves succumbing to existential navel-gazing.

I think people are isolated because of the nature of human consciousness, and they like it when they feel the connection between themselves and someone else.

A voice in my head tells me that I'm at the twilight of an extraordinary life. I say extraordinary because of the people who have loved me. I say twilight because of what people say to me in the supermarket.

As I've gotten older I've occasionally found myself nostalgic for earlier periods of solitude, though I realize that's also likely a false nostalgia, as I know there was nothing I wanted more during those periods than to not be alone, whatever that means.

Isolation is the worst possible counselor.

People say you become more cynical as you get older. That hasn't been my experience.

It's about trying to step out of being patterned and closed off and reclusive, which I've always had a problem with. It's about attempting to be normal and just go out and be around other people and hang out. I have a tendency to sometimes be pretty closed off and not see people for long periods of time and not call anyone.

What is it to be normal, at 12, at 78? What is it like when you can't grow up?

Isolation among older people is a massive problem, and my grandad used to come round for Sunday lunch every week for as long as I can remember.

So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.

No man is an island, as they say. No. I've tried it. I've gone on retreats at various times in my life for three or four or five days. I was desperate to get out of there and talk to somebody. But I fly fish a lot, and I can only do that really by myself. I find I'm never lonesome when I'm on a river, far from it, but it's a lonely practice.

People don't do me much good.

Alone, lonely people talk to themselves. In company, they often continue.

When I hear a grown man or woman say, "Once I had faith in men, now I have not," I am inclined to ask, "Who are you whom the world has disappointed? Have not you rather disappointed the world?"

Nothing is more dangerous than solitude.

Man was born to live with his fellow human beings. Separate him, isolate him, his character will go bad, a thousand ridiculous affects will invade his heart, extravagant thoughts will germinate in his brain, like thorns in an uncultivated land.

Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody - to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.

you'll never be lonely if you learn to be friend your self

It's very odd, being older, because in a way it's hard to own the past, even.