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Motherhood Quote by Charles Manson

"How old am I? I'm as old as my mother told me. How's that?"

About this Quote

It lands like a joke, but it’s really a jailbreak attempt: not from prison bars, but from biography. “How old am I?” is a basic, grounding question; Manson answers by dissolving the premise. “I’m as old as my mother told me” turns age from a fact into hearsay, pushing responsibility and identity back onto a figure who’s both origin story and alibi. The tag, “How’s that?” is pure needling performance - a comedian’s cadence repurposed as a dominance move, daring the listener to challenge him and, by extension, to step into his warped narrative.

The intent isn’t to be clever for its own sake. It’s to control the frame. Manson cultivated a persona that blurred childlike vulnerability with predatory manipulation, and this line does that in miniature: he presents himself as a product of maternal storytelling rather than an accountable adult with a record. The subtext reads: if my life is a tale someone else handed me, then don’t pin me down with your measurements - not age, not motive, not guilt.

Context matters because Manson’s notoriety depended on mythmaking as much as violence. In interviews, he often spoke in riddles and Zen-flavored non sequiturs to appear ungraspable, above the categories the public wanted to lock onto. This isn’t mystical; it’s tactical. By turning an ordinary question into a semantic fog, he keeps the spotlight while denying the audience the one thing it wants most: a stable, legible human explanation.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Manson, Charles. (2026, January 15). How old am I? I'm as old as my mother told me. How's that? FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/how-old-am-i-im-as-old-as-my-mother-told-me-hows-140134/

Chicago Style
Manson, Charles. "How old am I? I'm as old as my mother told me. How's that?" FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/how-old-am-i-im-as-old-as-my-mother-told-me-hows-140134/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"How old am I? I'm as old as my mother told me. How's that?" FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/how-old-am-i-im-as-old-as-my-mother-told-me-hows-140134/. Accessed 7 Feb. 2026.

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Charles Manson quote: age, authority, and identity
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About the Author

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Charles Manson (November 11, 1934 - November 19, 2017) was a Criminal from USA.

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