I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

A sense of freedom is something that happily comes with age and life experience.

Despite what anti-aging ads say growing older can be better. I feel better in my skin 100 percent. You have greater effects of gravity but the better sense of yourself you have is something I wouldn't trade. Women who lie about their age - 'why?'

Up until age 40 most men are just not as mature as women. So it makes sense that a lot of women date up in age a bit.

Losing both parents at a young age gave me a sense that you can't really control life - so you'd better live it while it's here. I stopped believing in a storybook existence a long time ago. All you can do is push in a direction and see what comes of it.

It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.

When I was younger my whole sense of self-worth was based on whether or not I was working which was awful. And I had a baby at 20 years old so it wasn't just about me. At around the age of 30 there was a stretch where I wasn't working - certainly not on anything I liked anyway - and I started to do other things.

We live in an age of instant knowledge. And there's almost a sense of entitlement to that.

There's also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration which everybody has painted as some glorious time in America but I remember as being a very very dark time. There was apocalypse in the air the punk rock movement made sense.