Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.

Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.

Here's a little tip for you. If you don't like being called a murderer, don't kill people.

Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?

That kind of friendship doesn't just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.

I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.