After graduating from high school, I worked at an advertising agency as a designer. After I left, I spent a year doing nothing in particular. At age 23, I drew my first comic.
I came into the advertising business in 1952, at the age of sixteen, as a delivery boy for a stuffy, old-line advertising agency named Ruthruff and Ryan, which could have served as the setting for the 'Mad Men' television series without moving a desk.
Women have been brought up to be passive, accepting, not come forward and play a major role in life. And with age, there's a tendency to revert to that - to pull back, recede. I don't think it's advisable or admirable.
I've been thinking, in an age of Trump where you don't know the direction of the country, the person you need most is a steady conservative hand like Mark Kirk in the Senate to be advising the president, especially on national security topics ... which is my particular expertise after 23 years in the Navy.
From a very early age, I wanted to fly aeroplanes.
Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.
In the 1940s, traveling for an African was a complicated process. All Africans over the age of sixteen were compelled to carry 'Native passes' issued by the Native Affairs Department and were required to show that pass to any white policeman, civil servant, or employer. Failure to do so could mean arrest, trial, a jail sentence or fine.
It became motivation as opposed to something else - the thing about poverty is that it starts affecting your mind and your spirit because people don't see you. I chose from a very young age that I didn't want that for my life. And it very much has helped me appreciate and value the things that are in my life now because I never had it.
At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first 'feeling' for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.
However much some journalists may criticize me, I know that I look, feel, and behave several decades younger than my actual age, and much of that is because I believe you are what you think you are. This is called positive affirmation, and it's a really strong tool.
When you see people your own age afflicted and experiencing life-threatening illnesses, I think it prompts you to apply to yourself the philosophy, 'I want to do the best I know how to do every day.'
I was taught from a young age that many people would treat me as a second-class citizen because I was African-American and because I was female.
I definitely think there needs to be more of a focus and movement on getting coding taught in schools. There's really only so much after-school programs like Black Girls Code can do to really drive that change. And those classes shouldn't only take place in high school. We should make sure that we teach kids about coding at an early age.
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
All diseases run into one, old age.
Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.
