(Concerning Garry Trudeau modeling the "Doonesbury" character "Duke" after him): "I've never met Garry Trudeau, but if I ever do, I'll set him on fire". (Comparing Las Vegas from when he wrote "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas" to today): "The city's frightening now. That's the basis of my reaction to Las Vegas. It's not the city I wrote about. It's not the same place at all. You'll notice that even the - what do you call them? - milestone or trademark casinos are now gone." "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." "When I attended a press conference for (President) 'Jimmy Carter' (I), I signed more autographs than Carter did. The Secret Service agents didn't know who I was. They thought I was an astronaut." (After the death of Richard Nixon in 1994): "If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin." (On Bill Clinton): "It's almost embarrassing to talk about Clinton as if he were important. I'd almost prefer Nixon. I'd say Clinton is every bit as corrupt as Nixon, but a lot smoother." "The last train out of any station will not be full of nice guys." "The world is still a weird place, despite my efforts to make clear and perfect sense of it." "By any accepted standard, I have had more than nine lives. I counted them up once, and there were thirteen times when I should have died." "The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason." "Some may never live, but the crazy never die." "Call on God, but row away from the rocks." "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." "Freedom is something that dies unless it's used." "We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear -- fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer." "The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is, are the ones who have gone over." "Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why." "Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top." "Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect." "If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up." [About conservative politician/writer Pat Buchanan] "We disagree so violently on almost everything that it's a real pleasure to drink with him." "I have a theory that the truth is never told between 9-5 business hours." "Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent." "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." [About the September 11, 2001 attack] "The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for peace in our time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: we are at war now - with somebody - and we will stay at war with that mysterious enemy for the rest of our lives." "It never got weird enough for me." "No one is stealing our freedoms, we're dealing them away." [In a letter to a friend] "Yes, once in a while I smile for a picture. See enclosed. It was taken for a passport." A group photo of the top ten journalists in America on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness. "Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be the President?" "Being barred from the White House is like being banned from the Playboy Club. It carries with it a certain distinction." "Life is full of odd moments -- you never know when you're gonna get defiant."