But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.

Gide’s remark wryly questions the efficacy of self-reinvention in midlife. The first sentence frames “resolutions” as a youthful practice—an optimistic belief that one can decide to change and then do so. The second sentence undercuts that optimism by pointing to the inertia of habit: by forty, one’s daily patterns and reflexes may have been rehearsed for decades, so that the self is less a set of intentions than an accumulation of routines. The line is comic, but also skeptical about moral or personal “fresh starts,” suggesting that character is largely sedimented early and that later change requires more than willpower or vows.