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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
Now that I've experienced ageism, I don't regard it as a bad thing. It's been a transition to something more exciting and maybe edgier.
I do feel that the trend is away from ageism and toward a recognition that older people have a unique voice.
I think age is just something written down on a piece of paper. I mean, you come across 20-year-olds who are like old people sometimes. I've never taken much account of age throughout my life - my own or anyone else's.
Ageing is inevitable, and the idea that we can be eternally youthful is the pitfall of our society.
I feel increasingly like age is very irrelevant. Quite often, cynicism is confused with wisdom, and my scorn is confused with a knowing, which I don't have.
'Ageism,' or whatever you want to call it, is a very English phenomenon. You don't get it too much in many other cultures. And no one says it about authors or poets or filmmakers. 'Oh, they're too old to make films or write books.'
The real problem is that there's a tendency to associate ageing with loss and decline and things that aren't desirable. But experiencing all that there is to experience in life - whether that's at the age of ten or thirty or fifty or eighty - is what life is all about.
Age doesn't bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It's the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.
In the music world, ageism is a big issue. It's about youth and youth culture. There's no other art form that I know that requires you to be a certain age.