In the modern media age we are rarely surprised by what we see. Whether it's on television or film or in the theatre everything is so advertised so trailed that most entertainment is merely what you thought it was going to be like.

I don't know why people are so obsessed with age anyway. I mean 90 is the new 70 70 is the new 50 and 50 is the new 40 so the whole act-your-age thing? Only up to a point.

My grandparents got married at a very young age and a lot of what I think about marriage is based on their relationship. I watched them over the years and saw how they dealt with everything together as a team.

The Border Ballads for instance and the Robin Hood Ballads clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age.

I grew up on a farm in a small town where you do or say one thing and everybody knows about it. You see it happen there's always the town gossip - 'Oh did you hear about so and so or did you hear what went on in this household?' So I learned at a very young age just to keep my mouth shut.

Being gay and being a woman has one big thing in common which is that we both become invisible after the age of 42. Who wants a gay 50-year-old? No one let me tell you.

I am at that age when you panic at the slightest thing.

In Hollywood you play a mom and the next thing you know you're on 'The Golden Girls.' They age you so fast.

When it comes to raising civilized kids there are no hard rules but there are two things on which most parents agree: Boys are generally wilder than girls and adolescents are wilder than kids of any other age. If you've got an adolescent boy you're in the sweet spot for trouble.

Credit or debit cards for starters are nothing short of shoppers' Novocain. Even in the age of digital purchases and virtual money we still attach a special value to dirty paper with pictures of presidents on it. Handing some of that to a cashier simply hurts more than handing over a little sliver of plastic.

Older fatherhood isn't all bad: testosterone rates drop about 1% per year as men age making them less reactive and more patient and a professionally established middle-aged man is likely to have more time and money to devote to his kids than a twenty-something who's just getting started.

The age thing really bugs me. Do people have more of a right to not like what I say because I'm 19?

My habit would have been to veer towards the dark - to prove I was something edgy or maybe to prove that I was cognisant of the dark side. Now with age and confidence I can say yeah that's true but I am cognisant of the fact that people can do things well. And can be more loving than you expect.

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.

Maybe it is something to do with age but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.

There's no way to approach anything in an objective way. We're completely subjective our view of the world is completely controlled by who we are as human beings as men or women by our age our history our profession by the state of the world.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well as it turned out I never wrote a great novel sadly and I never converted to Catholicism happily but I did do one thing he did. That is in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

I am firmly of the opinion that women who make a lot of effort to hang onto their looks in middle age (unless they are beauties entertainers or prostitutes) are rather sad as one should surely have something more substantial to recommend one by this time such as kindness or cleverness.

I hate the idea that you shouldn't wear something just because you're a certain age.

You hit a certain age and - especially because of TV - the young cooks coming up say 'You're a sellout because you're doing something other than what you should be doing.' 'Top Chef' is a double-edged sword for me: There's a whole group of people who will not come to the restaurants because they assume I'm not in them anymore all I do is TV.

I am happy being able to play roles with people my age because once you do something really mature there is no turning back.

When I write about a 15-year old I jump I return to the days when I was that age. It's like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. And when we moved to America it was just the typical thing except I was really good at it so was my brother.

I think you can't really escape any kind of spiritual education as a child whether it's New Age or Judaism or Buddhism or whatever it is. You can't escape it even if you completely disagree with it you still have it as a foundation that you base things off of.