Tim O'Brien Quotes

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.

It's not the same thing to make a work - a film, a book, a play - about youth as it is to make one about old age.

It's not humanly possible for anyone not to go through changes. Change is a constant in everyone's life, even in mine. I have enjoyed the change at every stage of my life.

Because I'm not the same today as I was in '58, or '59 or even '71.

See, life is a journey and every chapter is very interesting.

The early and the latter part of human life are the best, or, at least, the most worthy of respect; the one as the age of innocence, the other of reason.

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

I don't know if it's that the scripts are evolving or just that I'm getting older, but the characters become more interesting as you get older because you've lived more life at different stages. You've loved; you've lost; you have more of that journey.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

I wouldn't go back on my old days, though; everybody needs to have their wild years. It's just a question of when and I'd rather have had them early than be doing it as a mid-life crisis type thing.

Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.

To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.

I ain't what I used to be, but who the hell is?

The thing that's changed the way I do my stand-up act is having kids and getting older and wiser and smarter. There might be a joke or two in the past that I wish I hadn't done, but in the past, you can't have it back.

Whether it's 18 years old or 40 years old, we think we know what's going on. But if you're lucky enough to continue the journey, its amazing how we keep learning how much we didn't know.

I hate getting old, but I'm sticking with it!

Oh, my God, my thirties blew! Forties are great.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.

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

Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

To me rites of passage through life, that's a wonderful, beautiful thing.

I have seen quite a lot of things in life. I would not like to change anything. Because every moment of my life has taught me something.

People think my life has been tough, but I think has been a wonderful journey. The older you get, the more you realise it's not what happens, but how you deal with it.