Chris Crutcher Quotes

People always talk about how time flies; it's become sort of a colloquialism now. You don't really understand it until you reach your late 30s and early 40s - and I'm sure time will move even faster as I get older.

When we are young we lay up for old age; when we are old we save for death.

Youth is like a long weekend on Friday night. Middle age is like a long weekend on Monday afternoon.

At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all.

You get to a certain point in your life where you get closer to the end of your life than the beginning, and it colors your life, in a way.

At a certain point, you have to face the fact that you've turned into an old fart.

Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.

You can't put off being young until you retire.

As a person gets older, time gets more interesting. As a kid, you waste so much of it.

What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.

You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.

Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.

I do not really think about age. I am just sort of trying to get as much done before I get old and can't.

Time starts out as a notion. But after you turn fifty, time is not a notion anymore but a fact that you start feeling clearly, and in a way, it pushes you to become present in the present.

Middle Age - later than you think and sooner than you expect.

To grow up requires a whole life but to become old one night is enough.

When you are five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties, you know how old you are. I'm twenty-three you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties, something strange starts to happen. It is a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I'm--you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you are not. You're thirty-five. And then you're bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it's decades before you admit it.

I didn't mind getting old when I was young. It's the being old now that's getting to me.

If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.

Why is youth so short and age so long?

In my thirties I was doing it, in my forties I was organizing it and now, unfortunately, I can only talk about it.

Time can be such a menace to a man. By this age do that; by that age do better.

I'm turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don't have an infinite number of years left and if there's anything you want to say or represent, it's time to try it.

I keep trying to tell people. I said, at 40, 45, you're at that crossroads. You really are there. And it's not like you can have gain without pain, but this is it. The days are - like when I wrote this whole thing about, in the beginning of my first magazine. I said, "If you live to be 75 years old, that's 3,900 weekends. That's it."