Why life and reading begin after the age of 40 – W.H.Auden QUOTES FOR WRITERS (and people who like quotes)
Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our study to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology.
When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, “I know what I like,” he is really saying “I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu,” because between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.
W.H.Auden
2 comments on “Why life and reading begin after the age of 40 – W.H.Auden QUOTES FOR WRITERS (and people who like quotes)”
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BRIDGET WHELAN writer 
Oh Bridget, thank you for sharing this quote. I do appreciate it. Forty was a major shift for me as it was for many. In some ways, rather than childhood, it is our greatest ‘growth spurt’ in life.
Yes!