Zhang Yimou Quotes

Most writers, by the time they're 60, must have revisited their childhood a dozen times.

I think for all of us, as we age, there are always a few moments when you are shocked.

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

People will still give me attention: even when my teeth are gone, I'll have some good stories to tell.

I had to have experience, you know what I mean? Because I've been doing this since I was 14... I couldn't write about anything at 14. I had to live some life. I definitely lived some life.

You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.

I'm fascinated by people in their eighties and nineties. Especially those who are still creating and living in an interesting way. I am fascinated by them because they have so much to say now that they've lived for so long.

As we grow older, our bodies get shorter and our anecdotes longer.

After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.

It's taken me longer still to realize what a short span there is between those life experiences and the rest of your life. That's a job for the people who lived through it.

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

When I turned 45, I lay in bed reflecting on all life had taught me. My soul sprang a leak and ideas flowed out. My pen simply caught them and set the words on paper. I typed them up and turned them into a newspaper column of the 45 lessons life taught me. When I hit 50, I added five more lessons and the paper ran the column again.

Technically, I've been retired for some time now. All I ever do is occasionally write songs for friends, such as one, for a friend who had just turned 80. I wrote a song for him called, The First 80 Years are The Hardest.

As I've gotten older and my life is a lot more stable, I've gotten more into storytelling.

I'm always writing and reflecting on life. I want to suck it all in.

The older you get, the more 'mindfulness' becomes about trying to remember why you came upstairs.

There are things that you write when you're 20 and there are things that you write when you're 40 and then there are things that you write when you're old.

I put all my big revelations into songs when I was in my 20s; as you get older, revelations are harder to come by.

My films, sometimes, have my own reflections of life. They have life lessons I've had that I put across in a humorous or satirical way.

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

I felt like I had experienced a lot of things in the first chapter of my life, and I wanted it to inspire and motivate people, so I just started writing.

When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway.

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.

You know, by the time you reach my age, you've made plenty of mistakes if you've lived your life properly.