I found a good interview in Interview (May 1995) with author Martin Amis. I liked what he had to say on getting older:
Graham Fuller: Turning forty, as Richard and Gwyn do at the start of The Information, and as you did when you began writing it, seemed to be the moment when you realized your mortality, but a moment of relief, as well.
Martin Amis: You’re sort of glad you made it, even to that modest age. You get a dawning awareness of certain things, but it doesn’t come on your fortieth birthday. It comes around thirty-eight or thirty-nine; some people get it much earlier. There’s a youthful illusion that age and death are just a rumor and that, funnily enough, you’ve been picked to defy this law. Intellectually, you’re satisfied that you’re going to get old and die, but you don’t feel it in your gut. That feeling of exclusion from time as a universal process might even be the definition of youth. But around forty the jig is up, really, and it’s a full-time job looking the other way. You can’t get out of the road. It even puts shadows in the orbits of your eyes, that realization, and it changes your balance, your sense of your place in time. Also, you begin to make quite logical but obvious comparisons between what’s gone and what’s to come. And it isn’t good news, on the whole.
You sure are interested in aging for someone who’s only 26. Just don’t get ahead of yourself!
That’s a great quote, though, I think it can be good news, on the whole, depending on the choices we make. No doubt, there’s some sacrifice to be made – but the understanding is well worth it – to me. Course, I’m turning 32, not 42.
Since I got pregnant I quit worrying constantly about my own death and started worrying about something happening to Sarah. I’m not sure if that’s any better though.