The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.
After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
If I write something set 60 years in the future, I am going to have to explain how humanity got there, and that's becoming quite a big job.
Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.
To start your life as a character of 120 years when you are in your late thirties, and then go back in time about 20 years later to play the same character who is your own age then, its very complicated, but very interesting.
Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.
I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.
Much has been written about the life of the mind.
Our lives are a sequence of things. When we're alive, they're continuing, just as my words now are an improvisation. So the idea of 30 years is actually quite nebulous. It's impossible to encapsulate it. All you can do is go: 'what next?'