I think that all of us are 5-year-olds and we don't want to be embarrassed in the schoolyard. I've gone through things in my life. People say it must be so hard to do it in the public eye, but the truth is, when you go through hard things, it's just ...
Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis. You can sell a lot of junk to a lot of people by inventing a stage of life and giving it a name.
I see all these old people who don't have anything to do but eat, drink and sleep. I will never say 'retired' because that's such a finality that I don't want to be part of my life. I'll work until they throw me in a box.
When you get as old as I am, you kind of believe there's nothing new under the sun, but there's always a fresh way of looking at something. That's why I love working with young people. They remind you of things you used to know and have since forgott...
I love listening to wise old people talk about their past experiences. They truly have so many valuable lessons to teach about life, and I never get tired of listening and learning from them.
Everyone is always surprised by how old I am. They think I'm older, but it's always been that way. I'm the youngest of four - maybe you grow up quicker because you just watch the big people.
Europeans forget that one-third of the American people have had a personal conversation with Jesus Christ and that the born-again are not just little old ladies in black but also CEOs and provosts of universities and candidates for office.
There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they're basically taking modern people and putting them in old drag - it's sort of the 'Gone With the Wind' approach.
People think I'm just an old Luddite, but that's untrue. I buy every new gizmo as it comes out, play with it until I understand how it works, and then give it away.
Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.
I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word - politeness of the heart, a gentleness of the spirit.
In 'Gran Torino,' I play a guy who's racially offensive. But he learned. It shows that you're never too old to learn and embrace people that you don't understand to begin with. It seems like nobody else got that message, I guess.
The old Victorian laws against homosexuality were still on the statute books until the early 1990s. As a gay man living in Ireland, I and people like me found it easy to feel less than citizens.
In the old days you could do re-runs, and people would have to watch that because there's nothing else. But with Netflix and Amazon, Hulu, Xbox, as well as premium and regular cable, it's very hard to do that.
You have to be very careful how you insert new stuff, 'cause people want to hear the old stuff. It's like cooking, you know? You can't put too many peppers into the eggs... otherwise it's going to be distasteful.
In fact when Sweet Honey was ten years old it was too big for me to run, and I knew it, but I ran it for another thirteen years because I couldn't convince other people to really do it. And this year, I'm not running it.
The other thing that was very noticeable on that tour, not so much in the video, was the new young element that were coming to our shows... I started to see some very young people in the audience... maybe 14, 15, 16 years old.
A disk unbeknownst to the director can go to the producer in another city or in another office and that producer can edit behind the director's back much easier than in the old days. Since these dailies are now put on videotape, more kinds of people ...
I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.
People rarely speak of children; you hear of 'cohort groups' and 'standard variations,' but you don't hear much of boys who miss their cats or 6-year-olds who have to struggle with potato balls.
So if 1960 had occurred under the old convention system, Kennedy would have had a very hard time getting the Democratic nomination because he would have been rejected by all those people who had worked with him in Washington.
