V. S. Pritchett Quotes

When you are 20, 40 looks really old. When I was nearing 30, that seemed like a major milestone.

I think time just goes faster and faster. I'm saying this a few months away from my fortieth birthday. I don't know when and if one's identity ever does catch up with one's actual age. Personally I feel like I just got the hang of thirty-five.

As you get older what you think was 10 years ago was actually 15 years ago.

When you're a fledgling youth-type adult, it appears that all people in their 40s look old enough to be in a painting hanging on the wall of a stately home in England. It's not until you limp into your 70s that people in their 40s look too young to vote, and college cheerleaders closely resemble Yorkshire terriers.

When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.

I was 22, and 40 was old. To be 40 again!

It's funny, isn't it? When you are young you just want to be old, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.

How confusing the beams from memory's lamp are; One day a bachelor, the next a grampa. What is the secret of the trick? How did I get so old so quick?

You know what makes me feel old? When I see girls who are 20-something, or the new crop of actresses, and think, Aren't we kind of the same age?

As time goes by and you're getting older and stuff like that - getting older sucks. You know, I hear all this crap about, 'Oh, you can age with dignity.' Really?

Age affects how people experience time.

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

When I'm 60, maybe, I'll look at my pile of papers and wonder, What really happened that year?

I have to tell you I never in my life anticipated getting this old, this fast. It seems as if I were 25 just a few days ago.

When you're 16, 30 seems ancient. When you're 30, 45 seems ancient. When you're 45, 60 seems ancient. When you're 60, nothing seems ancient.

After 40, you want to reverse the ageing process. That's complicated for me because I spent so many years wanting to be older.

One can't feel old in a day or overnight!

I'm aging, and the world is seeing it.

I think the years leading up to 21 were a bit more fun than 21 and beyond might be.

I can barely remember what I was like 36 years ago when I was 21 years old.

Honestly, I didn't realize it - all of a sudden, I was 90. The years skipped by quickly. When it happened, I said, 'Where did the time go?'

Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.

Age is inevitable. Aging isn't.

As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.