Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I'm sure you've all heard of Hunter S. Thompson's book. I'd seen the movie, obviously, and read some of his columns over at Page 2 but had never read the book until today. Enjoyable stuff, despite his crazy reputation. Some highlights:

When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it heavy. Don't waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies. - pg. 173

What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create ... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. - pgs. 178-9

Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage. - pg. 200

Not so crazy after all.