People think I'm crazy because I travel too much, but I haven't been doing any of that lately because I got a little sick this year and I've tried to take care of it.

I also watched a lot of football and sports. I haven't had much time to watch too much TV lately.

A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

Lately, I've been a little sad that I'm not a gay man.

I used to define success as being able to produce any result you wanted, whether it was a relationship, weight-loss, being a millionaire, impacting the culture, changing society, whatever it might be - it might be homelessness, whatever - and lately, I've redefined success as 'fulfilling your soul's purpose.'

Lately, I've been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I've experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated.

I have asked myself once or twice lately what was my natural bent. I have no doubt at all: It is to look at each day for the evil of that day and have a go at it, and that is why I have never failed to have an acute interest in each morning's letters.

I grew up in what some would call an immaculately clean home. I hated my mom a little for it. I wasn't allowed to paint my nails, since they'd chip and 'look trashy.' My brother and I didn't run around in clothes that had holes or were stained.

Soldiers, I had lately like to have been taken from you by the attempt of a few desperate men, but by the grace and providence of the gods, I am still preserved.

The only good political movement I've seen lately was Occupy Wall Street. They had no leaders, which was genius. But unfortunately it always ends up with some hippy playing a flute.

I'm healthy now. I probably wouldn't say I'm at my best fitness level and I haven't played that much lately, but I'm healthy and that's all that matters.

Lately I did a film called All I Want for Christmas and it was well received. This gave me a new point of view and a new respect for my work as an actress.

Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self?

Lately, Nastoyna felt that she had no right to criticize anyone at all -- no man, no animal, no bird, because each lived his own life, which was not in his control and which he could not change.

"At sea, the darker the night the closer you will get to your past. The music you decide to play is the radio dial of your history. Van Morrison's "Have I Told You Lately" played as I stared at the setting moon. This is a song that always transports me to a New Hampshire backroad of my youth. Her name was Katie. She was tall, blond, and wore the girl next door look like an angel. She was smart, funny, and kind. She infatuated me from the moment I met her at Wentworth Marina. She was the daughter of two well-to-do doctors from upstate New York. It was her plan to sail around the world, and she wanted me to join her. "Just to mate" she would always say with a wink.

I had a lot of losing in my life lately, but this would be a loss that I just couldn't bear. The world is full of women-I had a chance to survive that. But a fish of this caliber was truly something special. I have seen a lot of women in my life, and none of them have ever had me yelling at the top of my lungs in excitement at first glance. Wonder women are rare, wonder fish are twice as rare. This fact was not lost on me.

Lately the muse has been treating me like Ike treated Tina.

"I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily?against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.

Ask a deeply religious Christian if he'd rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don't seem so bad lately.

so here i sit. a sum of the parts. about a third way down this wonderful path, so to speak. and i've been thinking lately about a friendship that fell apart with time, with distance, and with the misunderstanding of youth. i'm trying not to confuse sadness with regret. not the easiest thing at times. i dont regret that certain things happened. i understand that perhaps i had a choice in the matter, or perhaps i believe in fate. probably not, but so far actions as small as the quickest glance to events as monumental as death have pushed me slowly along to right here, right now. there was no other way to get here. the meandering and erratic path was actually the straightest of lines. take away a handful of angry words, things once thought of as mistakes or regrets, and i'm suddenly a different person with a different history, a different future. that, i would regret. so here i sit. thinking about a person i once called my best friends. a man who might be full of sadness and regret, who might not give a damn, or who might, just might, remember the future and realize that's where its at.

As science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. It's a big universe, of course, so He, She, or It, could be profitably employed in many places. But what has clearly been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that's no longer God's realm.

I am trying now to be entirely honest. I did actually comfort in the thought that the Devil had, on Strawless Common, defeated God. I much preferred that thought to the thought that God hadn't cared, hadn't helped Robin. I thought all the way back to the story of Eden. God, all-loving, all-wise, had surely wanted people to be happy and healthy and good; it was the Devil who spoiled it all...and since so many people were miserable and sickly and bad the Devil must indeed by very powerful. The lifeless, voiceless thing, lately a singing boy, which they had cut down and put under a sack in the barn to await an unhallowed cross-road grave seemed to me to prove the power of the Devil.

So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent dotard who soiled Himself and the universe with his corruption, a low-budget divinity passing itself off as the genuine article. (Ask the Gnostics.) They trust in Jesus Christ, a historical cipher stitched together like Frankenstein's monster out of parts robbed from the graves of messiahs dead and buried - a savior on a stick. They trust in the virgin-pimping Allah and his Drum Major Mohammed, a prophet-come-lately who pioneered a new genus of humbuggery for an emerging market of believers that was not being adequately served by existing religious products. They trust in anything that authenticates their importance as persons, tribes, societies, and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an afterworld that may be uncertain in its reality and unclear in its layout, but which states their craving for values "not of this earth" - that depressing, meaningless place their consciousness must sidestep every day.