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Gonzo . . . acidic hilarity . . . 'The Fun Parts' has fine moments, but it's not the whole Lipsyte story. Read it with 'The Ask' if you really want to know how a mordant jokester with a madman's imagination became a literary rock star.
Sep 17, 2025
There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death?
Dammit!" "What?" Gonzo sounds panicked. "We're out of gas." "You're Shithenging me." "I Shithenge you not.
We are all wired into a survival trip, now.
You better take care of me Lord, if you don't you're gonna have me on your hands.
I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right.
Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser.
Who said anything about slicing you up? ... I just wanted to carve a little Z on your forehead-- nothing serious.
So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.
Just sick enough to be totally confident
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
I have always been fascinated by dark and mysterious stuff. I guess I have a pretty dark and gloomy side. Writing songs saves me from going completely gonzo.
Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.
If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix.
It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat sh** and die.
I guess the biggest difference from the things I've done in the past is that my work will be more narrative-driven adult films or vignettes, not just "gonzo" scenes, which are straight sex, no storyline.
I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.
There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are..These occasions are rare, but they happen - despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.
There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.
Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception.
Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.
That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer - he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.
Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix & a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get.
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody understands at the time--and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.
No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt
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.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.
Gonzo narrows his eyes. 'How often do you clean that thing?' 'Every night,' the waitress answers. Her smile is strained. 'That's it? Do you know how long it takes for Listeria to grow under those hot lamps, even with ice?' Here we go. 'It can happen in just five hours. Five hours and you've got the salad bar of death!' The waitress looks confused. 'From Listerine?
Joe Klein is the flower of American political journalism, a sharp raconteur who shows traces of the gonzo style that was in vogue when he was honing his craft at Rolling Stone back in the day.
Sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind but falling in love and not getting arrested.
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.
Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
To the pessimist the light at the end of the tunnel is another train.
Seems like the light at the end of the tunnel may be you.
There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.
You don't know me, dude," he says, not smiling this time. Gonzo examines his cards, prepping for his next move. "People always think that they know other people, but they don't. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won't eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don't know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel ****ed up for no reason at all.
It is all well and good for children and acid freaks to believe in Santa Claus - but it is still a profoundly morbid day for us working professionals. It is unsettling to know that one out of every twenty people you meet on Xmas will be dead this time next year.... Some people can accept this, and some can't. That is why God made whiskey, and also why Wild Turkey comes in $300 shaped canisters during most of the Christmas season...
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.
Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
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.