"Don't worry about me, Gettys. Don't worry about me. I'm Charles Foster Kane! I'm no cheap, crooked politician, trying to save himself from the consequences of his crimes! [louder] Gettys! I'm going to send you to Sing Sing! Sing Sing, Gettys! Sing Sing!"

"A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own."

"I don't think there's one word that can describe a man's life."

"[I entered this campaign] with one purpose only, to point out and make public the dishonesty, the downright villainy of Boss Jim W. Gettys' political machine, now in complete control of the government of this state. I made no campaign promises, because until a few weeks ago, I had no hope of being elected. Now however, I am something more than a hope. Jim Gettys, Jim Gettys has something less than a chance. Every straw vote, every independent poll shows that I'll be elected. Now I can afford to make some promises. The working man, the working man and the slum child know they can expect my best efforts in their interests. The nation's ordinary citizens know that I'll do everything in my power to protect the underprivileged, the underpaid, and the underfed."

"I run a couple of newspapers. What do you do?"

"I was on my way to the Western Manhattan Warehouse in search of my youth. You see, my mother died a long time ago and her things were put in storage out West. There wasn't any other place to put them. I thought I'd send for them now. Tonight, I was going to take a look at them. You know, a sort of sentimental journey."

"We have no secrets from our readers. Mr. Thatcher is one of our most devoted readers, Mr. Bernstein. He knows what's wrong with every issue since I've taken charge."

"I always gagged on that silver spoon."

"If I don't look after the interests of the underprivileged, maybe somebody else will. Maybe somebody without any money or property, and that would be too bad!"

"You're right. I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year! You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in 60 years."

"It's my duty and — I'll let you in on a little secret — it's also my pleasure to see to it that decent, hard-working people in this community aren't robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates, just because they haven't had anybody to look after their interests."

"As Charles Foster Kane who owns eighty-two thousand, six hundred and thirty-four shares of public transit - you see, I do have a general idea of my holdings - I sympathize with you. Charles Foster Kane is a scoundrel. His paper should be run out of town. A committee should be formed to boycott him. You may, if you can form such a committee, put me down for a contribution of one thousand dollars."

"If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough."

"The news goes on for 24 hours a day."

"Rosebud..."

"FINISH THE FUCKING STORY!"

"Flea - Hippie"

"Lyle Lovett - The Road Person"

"Craig Bierko - Lacerda"

"Michael Jeter - Dr. Elron Bumquist"

"Katherine Helmond - The Desk Clerk at Mint Hotel"

"Cameron Diaz - The Blonde TV Reporter"

"Mark Harmon - The Magazine Reporter at Mint 400"

"Christina Ricci - Lucy"

"Gary Busey - The Highway Patrolman"

"Ellen Barkin - The Waitress at North Star Cafe"

"Tobey Maguire - The Hitchhiker"

"A drug person can learn to cope with things like seeing their dead grandmother crawling up their leg with a knife in her teeth, but nobody should be asked to handle this trip. Bazooko's Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing every Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This was the Sixth Reich."

"Benicio del Toro - Dr. Gonzo"

"Johnny Depp - Raoul Duke"

"Buy the ticket, take the ride."

"Four Days, Three nights, Two Convertibles, One City."

"As your attorney, I advise you to take a hit out of the little brown bottle in my shaving kit."

"Hey honkies. You folks wanna buy some heroin ? Goddamnit, I'm serious. All I'm trying to sell you is some pure fucking smack! This is the real stuff! You won't get hooked. I just got back from Vietnam."

"And when it comes to that fantastic note... when the rabbit bites his own head off, I want you to throw that fucking radio into the tub with me."

"It's ok, he's just admiring the shape of your skull!"

"1965. The great San Francisco acid wave. I recall one night in a place called the Matrix. There I was. [does a double take, seeing the real Hunter S. Thompson sitting nearby (doppelganger)] Mother of God, there I am! Holy fuck! Uh...clearly I was a victim of the drug explosion - a natural street freak, just eating whatever came by."

"[points skyward] Oh, you evil bastard! This your work. You better take care of me, Lord, 'cause if you don't you'll have me on your hands!"

"With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever. Always thinking just behind some narrow door in all of his favorite bars, men in red woolen shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he'll never know."

"Ah, devil ether. It makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel. Total loss of all basic motor function. Blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue. The mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column. Which is interesting because you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can't control it."

"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."