“You get ugly when you get old,” Martin Amis said at the 2011 Hay literary festival in Mexico. “It’s all perfectly simple. Everything seems fine until you’re about 40. You look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, ‘While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it’s a funny thing, but I’m an exception to that rule.’ Then it becomes a full-time job trying to convince yourself that it’s true.”
