He remembered his mentor, Lou Kline, telling him in the nineties that rock and roll had peaked at Monterey Pop. They'd been in Lou's house in LA with its waterfalls, the pretty girls Lou always had, his car collection out front, and Bennie had looked into his idol's famous face and thought, You're finished. Nostalgia was the end - everyone knew that.

Stu walked Bennie over to Chris in the chair and parted his hair to reveal some tan little creatures the size of poppy seeds moving around on his scalp. Bennie felt himself grow faint.'Lice' the barber whispered.'They get it at school'. 'But he goes to private school' Bernie had blurted.'In Crandale,New York!

And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.

We're [writers] all afraid of writing badly, and there are psychological reasons, like the bad interior of ourselves is somehow being revealed, but we all fear that, and you can't write well if you're not willing to write badly. That's why you have to make writing a habit, so it feels normal and not strange.

I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, I'm going to ace this. It's just not who I am.

Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet.

some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.