Second Act Quotes

I'm still a horse that can run. I may not be able to win the Derby, but what do you do when you retire? People retire and they vegetate. They go away and they dry up.

Happily ever after never happens in the second act.

I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.

I don't see myself in politics at 51. I definitely want to do something else.

I was already 50 when I started in television.

I didn't actually begin professionally acting until I was 30.

Also, if you watch the film once, there are lots of things that you won't get because there are punch lines in the first act, the setup to which isn't until the second act.

The years after 50 can be a time of great productivity, meaningful work, pleasure, creativity, and innovation. It's a huge opportunity.

You can have a full life after 50.

The Reagan Revolution has had no second act.

I am not thinking about life after football, but I know it will be another life, another world.

I see retirement as just another of these reinventions, another chance to do new things and be a new version of myself.

The first act is the easiest to plot. The second act is always the hardest to plot. Generally a good, you know, sometimes the third act can be difficult because you can get into a rut in the third act - everybody runs to their Corvette, has a chase, and you catch the bad guy.

I was an early peaker, and then I went through a depressive part of my life and had some struggles personally. Things don't always happen as you'd expect them to happen, but there's always a second act.

When I came back into show business in '88 after spending 20-odd years in the civil service, it wasn't planned.

I'd really like to show women my age - who've had children grow up or lost husbands or retired after working all their lives - that there are options. There are choices. We don't have to just sit around and be invisible.

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

Life after 50 or 60 is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence - and just as adventurous.

I may be 80, but I intend to keep acting until the day I die. Instead of slowing down, I've discovered my second wind.

I feel like I'm getting the best parts of my career in my 50s.

If you start a new career at 40, you've still got another 35 years to go.

I just turned 66, and I'm starting to work again.

We try to tell these guys that the end of a boxing career isn't the end of their lives: it's the beginning of a new one.

Doing a movie in Tel Aviv or London or South Africa or Mexico. It's this great second act to my career, and it's a real good time.

In the first act, you get the audience's attention - once you have it, they will repay you in the second. Play through the laughs if you have to. It will only make the audience believe there are so many of them that they missed a few.