KT Tunstall Quotes

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

I'm sure people in the business have said: She's too old for that part. I don't hear about it because your agent protects you from those negative things.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

Hollywood looks to these young people now to say something to the world. I have nothing against that, I think a lot of people have things to say. But I think you need life experience.

And if you don't live, you have nothing to write about.

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

Growing older is not upsetting; being perceived as old is.

I'm passionate about old people because I am one myself.

'Ageism,' or whatever you want to call it, is a very English phenomenon. You don't get it too much in many other cultures. And no one says it about authors or poets or filmmakers. 'Oh, they're too old to make films or write books.'

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

When you are old enough to... play powerful parts, who cares if you are 45, 55 or 65?

I don't like age barriers. I don't like when people treat you differently when they find out how old you are.

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

I don't want to be the oldest anything in America. Sorry about that.

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.

I needed time to stand back and go through a lot more experience in life. Then I have something to write about, joke or to animate.

If you are a good writer you use your life experience to do something different than someone who is 20-years-old can do. That is where you get your power. That is our power as a group. I am not trying to make the same music I made 10 years ago.

You know, the age thing really bugs me. Do people have more of a right to not like what I say because I'm 19? I'm up here because of what I write. Obviously, I must know something, or I wouldn't have been nominated for Best New Artist. Sometimes it's like, "You're right. My mother wrote these songs."

Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you've been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.

Forty-years-old these days is the beginning of people's lives. I've found myself, I'm confident, I'm mature, I've been through some stuff, I'm ready to write my book.

You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.

Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.

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.

Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from nature to add local color. The results are invariably false and hollow. Art must spring out of the fullness and richness of life.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.