Time & Perspective Quote by Alan Bates

Bates’s line lands like a modest aphorism, then quietly reveals its trapdoor. “Living out your own time” sounds like a tasteful endorsement of authenticity: be present, don’t cosplay another era, stop romanticizing the past. Coming from an actor, it also reads as a rebuke to the profession’s neatest lie - that you can simply “become” someone else. Bates is nudging us toward a tougher ideal: inhabiting the moment you actually have, with its limitations, politics, and tastes, rather than laundering yourself through nostalgia.

Then he slips in the qualifier: “unless it’s absolutely impossible, which it is for some people.” That’s the moral sting. The sentence refuses the smug version of self-determination. It acknowledges that “your own time” isn’t equally livable. For some, the era they’re born into is hostile - because of class, sexuality, race, illness, temperament, or just the unlucky mismatch between a person and a culture’s available roles. Bates, who often played men at odds with their social scripts, sounds like he’s defending the misfits who aren’t being precious when they flee into art, fantasy, or earlier codes of honor; they’re improvising shelter.

The craft subtext matters: actors are paid to time-travel, to borrow other people’s constraints. Bates flips that into empathy. He’s not celebrating escapism; he’s diagnosing it. The quote works because it balances two truths that usually get separated into moral categories: presence is a discipline, and escape can be a form of survival.