Age and Creativity Quotes

If you are creative, you get busier as you get older.

I hadn't published a book of poetry in over a decade because I've been very ill. As I got better and started to write, I said, 'Wow, even as an old woman, I could have a selected book of poems.'

I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40.

No, I don't think a 68-year-old copywriter . . . can write with the kids. That he's as creative. That he's as fresh. But he may be a better surgeon. His ad may not be quite as fresh and glowing as the Madison Ave. fraternity would like to see it be, and yet he might write an ad that will produce five times the sales. And that's the name of the game, isn't it?

Everyone is a poet at 16, but how many are poets at 50? Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical.

My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.

It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they're rare.

One of the things that's happened in the music I love over the past five, 10 years is that some people have gotten very old and continued to make music.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

We must first get over the myth that older workers can’t innovate.

Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.

I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.

All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.

I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.

Must one become seventy years old to recognize that one's greatest strength lies in creating musical kitsch?

I wrote my first song when I was 54 years old.

I'm too old to make drawings.

I was nearly 40 when I started. I had no fear that I wasn't going to write. I knew it was just delayed. Then, my goodness, I never stopped.

As it can be maintained that all the great advances have come from men under forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians, nearly all the great mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels and not a few of the bad sermons and speeches.

Tell me, why do former young designers who are now in their middle 40s have to redo the 1960s and 70s. Why they cannot invent fashion for today?