It's the age-old thing - it's such a cliche - but why worry about things you have no control over?
The age-old mistake, which has stunted countless lives, is the assumption that because physical hardship in childhood makes you physically tough, emotional hardship must make you emotionally tough.
If you decide to tell a kid that looks don't matter, she can prove you wrong every day. Because they see it everywhere. That is age-old, going back to the Greeks, but now we're bombarded nonstop.
When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.
I remain faithful to bourbon sour. It's absolutely delicious. You'd have to ask a bartender what's in it, but I think if you know you might never have a drink. I also love a little rum, 7 years aged, brown, when it is chilly, before dinner.
You will find in me a middle aged man with a career behind me sufficiently brilliant to enable me to talk about many things interestingly; and I am not an unkindly soul, I believe.
Once you have done with school, you realise that it is just a smaller version of life, and really I have felt that I should have been an adult since I was aged about five.
I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.
You don't want to wait for that aged jockey role.
Realise when you are 'middle aged' you have a chance for a whole second career, another love, another life.
There are things I'd wish weren't part of ageing. But what you gain is much more than you're giving up. I don't think you come into your own until you're 35 or so.
After 40, you want to reverse the ageing process. That's complicated for me because I spent so many years wanting to be older.
I know I'm supposed to say ageing doesn't bother me, then suddenly you're like, 'Yeah, I care about it, I really worry about it. I'm getting old. I'm old!'
Science is, rightly, searching for drugs to arrest ageing or to slow the advance of dementia. But the evidence suggests that many of the most powerful factors determining how you age come from what you do, and what you do with others: whether you work, whether you play music, whether you have regular visitors.
People's opinions don't interfere with me. Ageing gracefully is supposed to mean trying not to hide time passing and just looking a wreck. That's what they call ageing gracefully. You know?
Ageism works in both directions. As a teenager in the public eye, people would talk condescendingly to me. When you get older there's this feeling that you have to start carving up your face and body. Right now I'm in the middle ground - I think women in their thirties are taken seriously.
There's ageism in everything. I don't give a hoot. It isn't what other people think; it's what you think. But it's hard to come to terms with getting older. I admire people like Vivienne Westwood.
For artists of my caliber, we're not played on the radio, so we don't really get a chance to get involved in that debate at all. We don't get a chance, because this weird kind of ageism exists in pop music. If you're past a certain age, you're not relevant. That's the kind of cliched term.
It's getting better but men still earn more and there are more jobs for them. Ageism is a big thing. Parts for women disappear as you get older.
I am concerned about ageism and the loss of beauty - the perception that as you grow older, you 'lose your looks,' which I think is diabolical.
