Raoul Duke: That bastard isn't gonna get away with this. I mean, what is going on in this country when a scumsucker like that can get away with sandbagging a doctor of journalism? Can you tell me that?
Dr. Gonzo: Can we make it? I wanna leave fast. Raoul Duke: Okay, let's pay this bill, get up very slowly... I think it's gonna be a long walk.
L. Ron Bumquist: I'm not really sure I can answer that, but what I can say is that if Margaret Mead, at her age, smoked grass... she'd have one hell of a trip!
Raoul Duke: If I were you, I'd leave the Doctor alone until after he's eaten his breakfast because he's a very crude man. [at absolutely nothing] Raoul Duke: Jesus God!
If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change. The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference. I still didn't know the difference.
I hadn't been able to trust since the age of four. I was torn between wanting to be cradled and telling the world to go fuck itself, and those were opposite sides of the same coin.
One look into your beautiful eyes, and my self-loathing soul felt envy. I had become vulnerable that instant...helpless, wanting, hating, resenting, loathing...” -Nina Jean Slack, Once Lost, Forever Found (Vol. #1)
I feel an intense intimacy with those who have this loathing interest in me. Further than this, I know what they mean, I sympathize with them, I understand them. There should be a name (as poetic as love) for this relationship between loather and loa...
[watching Dr. Gonzo leave] Raoul Duke: There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.
Raoul Duke: There's a uh, big machine in the sky, some kind of, I dunno, electric snake, coming straight at us. Dr. Gonzo: Shoot it. Raoul Duke: Not yet, I want to study its habits.
Raoul Duke: Total control now. Tooling along the main drag on a Saturday night in Vegas. Two good old boys in a fire-apple red convertible. Stoned. Ripped. Twisted. Good people.
Raoul Duke: My attorney had never been able to accept the notion, often espoused by former drug abusers, that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them, and neither have I for that matter.
Raoul Duke: In some circles, the Mint 400 is a far far better thing than the Superbowl, the Kentucky Derby, and the lower Oakland roller derby finals all rolled into one. This race attracts a very special breed.
Dr. Gonzo: We won't make the nut unless we have unlimited credit. Raoul Duke: Jesus Christ, we will, man. You Samoans are all the same. You have no faith in the essential decency of the white man's culture.
Raoul Duke: Kill the body, the head will die. Ali-Frazier fight. Crazy shit, man. Magazine Reporter: Upper end of the Sixties. Ali beaten by a human hamburger. Raoul Duke: Both Kennedys murdered by mutants? Shit.
Dr. Gonzo: As your attorney, I advise you to buy a motorcycle. How else can we cover a thing like this righteously? Raoul Duke: We'll just have to drum it up on our own. Pure Gonzo journalism!
I've had my successes and failures. I know many academics in my field loathe me. I've come to loathe them back, as it seems only polite to do so. But at heart it's absurd; we should band together against the big common enemies.
The Q I loathe and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one: 'Where,' the reader asks, 'do you get your ideas?' It's a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, 'I don't know.'
How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection..
No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.
