Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.

I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you're faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.

I've got this theory that human beings are innately religious; we have a belief system. It doesn't have to be a theist form, necessarily. But we need a belief system, some framework on which to hang our behavior.

Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you're not looking, without you adding to the drama.

Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different

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.

A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.