“A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.”

“As a child I had wanted to become an automobile, but then I grew up to be thirty years old.”

“Thirty-one years old, and already Naaliyah was more comfortable with insects than people: they were more chemically predictable, more elegantly designed.”

“I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I am old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless.”

“The truth is, part of me is every age. I’m a three-year-old, I’m a five-year-old, I’m a thirty-seven-year-old, I’m a fifty-year-old. I’ve been through all of them, and I know what it’s like. I delight in being a child when it’s appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it’s appropriate to be a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own.”

“Inside every seventy-year-old is a thirty-five-year-old asking, 'What happened?”