I think that it's so powerful for me to go see someone like Bridget Everett at Joe's Pub and watch her weave her songs in and out of these funny, tragic stories - you can talk and sing and it's not this horrible offense, you're going to get thrown in artistic jail.
A lot of my words come to me when I'm out and about as well, riding the bus or sat in the pub. I went through a stage of going to a strip bar called the White Horse at lunch times and did a lot of writing in there. They were fine with that but I don't know how they would feel about me setting up the easel.
The other night I went out to have dinner in a London pub and the barmaid had this whole conversation saying, 'You look just like that guy from Twilight'. Every time she came up, she said something like, 'You literally could be his brother'. But she never put two and two together.
What I like about organizing things that way is that each story gets nearly full reign over its own space, but all of them are hung on a single string - the loosely-reined voice mentioned above. Thus the collection jogs away from suzerainty and past federation toward, I guess, alliance. Or maybe call each story a separate house on a single street? Or it's all a line of dive bars on some wharf front? What the hell, let's call reading the collection a pub crawl, but with words.
I come from a place where there's violence and inarticulacy. I worked in a pub from the age of 12 or 13. I used to see people smashing glasses over each other. I was never tough. I was scared of them.
Ignore the trade-pub narratives about how little success indies enjoy.
I firmly believe as an author you have to go out in life and hear the stories of people. In pubs in the UK or a retirement home in the US it is the stories of others that bring a book to life.
What's fascinating is where they come from in the world. People in Bangladesh, a chap in a fire-base in Tikrit in Iraq. Chap in an Irish pub in Dublin. And lovely to think this literary network - or rather network of readers - is well spread out.
You could write a joke in the pub at lunchtime and watch it performed on television that evening.
I don't want to get them in trouble for crimes in the early '90s - but there was usually like one pub that was the soft touch in terms of you could get served under 18, and that pub was The Rose and Crown.
I love Tate Modern; there's such great style and shopping here. I love the galleries and the pubs out on the street, just having your pint as the sun is setting.
If it wasn't for O'Flanagan's Pub on Manhattan's Upper East Side, I don't know where I would have spent my Friday nights as a young man.
in McAnally's pub and grill, there aren't any service people. According to Mac, if you can't get up and walk over to pick up your own order, you don't need to be there at all.
I was shocked by the amount of Welsh people in L.A. We'd go to this British pub to watch the 'Six Nations' early in the morning and I remember the first time I walked in it was just a sea of red.
If I listened to my instincts, I'd be down at the pub chasing women, not under a 400 pound bar squatting
Spare a thought for the poor introverts among us. In a world of party animals and glad-handers, they're the ones who stand by the punch bowl. In a world of mixers and pub crawls, they prefer to stay home with a book. Everywhere around them, cell phones ring and e-mails chime and they just want a little quiet.
I was 18 when I first visited London, I'm very provincial like that, but I must confess the moment I got to America I thought: This is the place. It was more open, with 24-hour cities and pubs and restaurants that didn't close.
If your version of pub food is microwaving a pie and some baked beans, then yeah, it's really complicated cooking. But if it's just about getting the best out of simple ingredients, then it's not.
We played every bar, party, pub, hotel lounge, church hall, mining town - places that made Mad Max territory look like a Japanese garden.
The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret.
As I was getting interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, or some big pub guy, all I remember was that he went off to the bathroom for a second, and they brought out my omelet. The next thing I remember, I woke up, and I was on the side of my own omelet, and there was no one at Buck's. Everyone was gone. They just let me sleep.
I think one of the greatest compliments I've ever received was when a young kid came backstage at Joe's Pub, when I had the "Bronx In Blue" album out. He said, "What Jimmy Reed did for you, you do for me."
I love those people who do story-telling and who ramble on, but I don't do that, I tell jokes - the sort of jokes that anyone really could tell in the pub.
I think a lot of people do have questions about life, 'What's the purpose of my life?', 'What's the meaning of my life?', 'Why am I here?' ... It's hard to find a place where you can discuss those issues. You can't go down to the pub and say, 'What do you think the meaning of life is?' But actually, most people have those questions, somewhere in the back of their minds. And if you can find a place where you can discuss it with a group of people who, like you, are outside of the Church, and it's a non-threatening, relaxed environment, quite a lot of people want to do that.
I have a lot of funny friends, though not everyone's funny all the time. Doon Mackichan's my funniest friend in the pub; Nina Conti's the funniest with a monkey.
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