But the reality is when you write a song, you should be able to strip away all the instruments and just have a song right there with an acoustic guitar and a voice, and the song should be good.
You know, I'm playing the Mirage in Vegas, the main room. . . About 5 percent of all comics end up as the main headliner on the Vegas Strip, so that's a big deal for me. Getting to do my stand-up the way I have this summer is really what I've dreamed of since I was about 10 years old.
Playing golf is like going to a strip joint. After 18 holes you are tired and most of your balls are missing.
Okay, I'll strip. I'll tap dance. I'll sing 'La Cucaracha' in C minor.
Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
I hate it when men go to strip bars. It lowers the rest of us that know if a man has to pay to see a woman naked, he is a loser and probably should get weeded out.
At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.
Writers remember everything. . . especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.
Anybody who can afford a box of business cards can afford a Web site. Any company with an 800 number can move its services to the Web for peanuts by comparison. The extreme case of corporate promotion is to strip away all other aspects of your business and sell goods or services via the Net alone, as amazon. com has done with books.
I'm not excited when bands strip things down. I'm not excited by the White Stripes.
I saw the comics in the East Village Other, and they weren't superhero comics, they were all about hippies and all about things hippies were interested in. And there was one page in particular, a full page strip called "Gentle's Trip Out" signed "Panzika", and it was totally, totally psychedelic, and really, I don't know if it made any sense at all but it looked so great, and I thought, "This is what I want to do, this is my big influence," and it was.
When you focus on delighting an audience you care about, you strip the masses of their power.
To love is to be selfless. To be selfless is to be fearless. To be fearless is to strip your enemies of their greatest weapon. Even if they break our bodies and drain our blood, we are unvanquished. Our goal was never to live; our goal is to love. It is the goal of all truly noble men and women. Give all that can be given. Give even your life itself.
I used to imagine it. I used to pretend that my Peugeot driving to the gym in the rain in Dublin was a Ferrari on the Vegas strip. And now that I have that? I can't even describe that feeling. That's why I like the best - the best cars, the best food, the best watches.
A few drinks later you're not so choosy when the closing lights strip off the shadows on this strange new flesh you've found.
It's okay, Chancellor, you can touch them. Sometimes I just strip down to a tank top and stare at these guns in front of a mirror all day long.
The anger of the people in the Gaza Strip is mainly directed toward those who are responsible for the dire living conditions, for the occupation and the blockade. But, yes, for sure, as is the case everywhere, there are some who oppose the government. But they are very few compared to the close to 2 million inhabitants of Gaza suffering under Israel, the occupying power.
When I'm doing a book tour in the States, I'll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don't know where I am right away. I'll go to the window, and it doesn't help there either, especially if you're in an anonymous strip and it's the usual Victoria's Secret, Gap, Chili's, Applebee's.
It's hard to tell if anyone's interested in reading a serialized story. But it's interesting to put in a cliffhanger each week. That was popular in old comic strips. They'd write a weekend story different from the daily strip. So people follow one story day to day, and a separate story on weekends. If you read them, you think "I'll read two more. " Then you're like "I gotta find out!" And you read 500 more.
We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?