Your 40s are a major trough. About the age of 50 feelings of satisfaction begin to rebound and keep rising into your 50s 60s and 70s with health being a major factor.

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

Having come to live in this age is as though one were to have entered another country. Learn its language or risk being left out.

Being gay and being a woman has one big thing in common which is that we both become invisible after the age of 42. Who wants a gay 50-year-old? No one let me tell you.

There are a lot of downsides to being male. We age faster and die younger. But give us this: we're lifetime baby-making machines. Women's reproductive abilities start to wane when they're as young as 35. Men? We're good to go pretty much till we're dead.

There's no way to approach anything in an objective way. We're completely subjective our view of the world is completely controlled by who we are as human beings as men or women by our age our history our profession by the state of the world.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well as it turned out I never wrote a great novel sadly and I never converted to Catholicism happily but I did do one thing he did. That is in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

I am happy being able to play roles with people my age because once you do something really mature there is no turning back.

The year I was born 1956 was the peak year for babies being born and there are more people essentially our age than anybody else. We could crush these new generations if we decided too.

Just as we reject racism sexism ageism and heterosexism we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race sex age or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.