Judith Viorst Quotes

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

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.

It's funny how you get a bit older and become more accepting of things. When you're in your twenties, you're skeptical of everything. I definitely felt like that.

I suspect I was not the first 21-year-old who thought he knew more than he did. And one of the virtues of age, one of the virtues of getting married and becoming a father, is it often leads one to take a more measured approach to life.

I try to say something about the human condition whenever I can when I'm lucky.

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

I feel like every movie, I've learned more and more about what I think of the world and what I'm trying to figure out.

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.

I've been writing about growing old for some time, really from the beginning of my career. It's something I'm apparently hung up about and now that I am old, hopefully I speak about it with some authority.

When you're 22 or 23, you think the world revolves around you, and I felt that way for a long time. But I just turned 30, and I love it! You realize, 'Whoa, baby, you ain't all that.' And you're not! You're just a woman out there doing something she loves.

You've got to live life to write a book about it.

As you get older, you come to a place in life where you can't just live in the present.

I think this is how life is. It's not a linear march through time; you revolve around the same old things as you age and acquire experiences.

The words come from here. From memories, from dreams, from people I've known. I'm always writing and reflecting on life. I want to suck it all in.

The feelings we all have as 50-year-olds are different than the feelings we all have as 30-year-olds. That informs everything we do.

When people get older, they get bitter or get cute.

At the age of seventeen, I left school. I went to university, and I wrote my first attempts at poetry in a room in a flat at the edge of the city.

We're both getting older, our children are starting to leave home. But I can say that I'm just as passionate a songwriter now in my 50s as I was in my 20s. But instead of talking about the general kind of angst that I felt as a teenager, I'm writing about more specific issues.

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.

With age and experience, I started to know myself better.

There's something about being around a long time that puts stuff in perspective.

I'm aware, as I get older, there are less and less stories that really pertain to me and who I am and where I'm going.

I draw inspiration from everything I've seen and been through. My life has been my biggest teacher.

Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.

In an active life is sown the seed of wisdom; but he who reflects not, never reaps; has no harvest from it, but carries the burden of age without the wages of experience; nor knows himself old, but from his infirmities, the parish register, and the contempt of mankind. And age, if it has not esteem, has nothing.