You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I'd have to take a year or two off and find whatever menial labouring work you can get as a middle-aged, unskilled bald man.

An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.

I like very strong guys. Successful guys. Not necessarily financially.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

A lot of middle-aged women are children still trying to find their way.

If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It's always small, but it's real.