"Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. Make the bastard chase you. He will follow."

"[yelling at a crowd in a parking lot] You people voted for Hubert Humphrey! And you killed Jesus!"

"Everything was automatic. I could sit in the red-leather driver's seat and make every inch of the car jump, by touching the proper buttons. It was a wonderful machine: Ten grand worth of gimmicks and big-priced Special Effects. The rear-windows leaped up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond. The white canvas top ran up and down like a roller-coaster. The dashboard was full of esoteric lights & dials & meters that I would never understand — but there was no doubt in my mind I was in a superior machine."

"There was only one road back to L.A., U.S. interstate 15. Just a flat-out high speed burn through Baker, and Barstow, and Berdoo. Then on to the Hollywood freeway straight into frantic oblivion. Safety... obscurity... just another freak in the freak kingdom. We'd gone in search of the American dream, it had been a lame fuck around. A waste of time. There was no point in looking back. Fuck no, not today, thank you kindly. My heart was filled with joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger, a man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident. The bolded lines are from the film version."

"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a main era... The kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. 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 in the world. Whatever it meant. 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. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."

"There was no sense in blowing everything away for the sake of some violent ape I'd never even met."

"Psychedelics are almost irrelevant in a town where you can wander in a casino any time in the day or night and witness the crucifixion of a gorilla."

"FINISH THE FUCKING STORY!"

"My attorney had never caught on to the notion espoused by some former drug users that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them. And neither have I, for that matter."

"Don't go near that elevator - that's just what they want us to do... trap us in a steel box and take us down to the basement."

"We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, 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 only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon."

"Jesus! Bad waves of paranoia, madness, fear and loathing, intolerable vibrations in this place. Get out! The weasels were closing in. I could smell the ugly brutes."

"[Yelling to Dr. Gonzo] PLEASE, TELL ME ABOUT THE FUCKING GOLF SHOES!"

"[Responding to Waitress] Madame, sir, baby, child, whatever..."

"I was right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo! And somebody was giving booze to these god damn things! It wont be long now, before they tear us to shreds."