We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb.

A journalist into Gonzo is like a junkie or an egg-sucking dog; there is no known cure.

Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.

The writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it — or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages.

Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.

The time has come to get full-bore into heavy Gonzo Journalism, and this time we have no choice but to push it all the way out to the limit.

When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it. So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door,.

I like to think that I can still draw the line between savage humor and brute-serious journalism … but maybe not; and I suspect that when the final truth is known, if ever, there will be no real difference at all.

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride. and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well. maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone's imagination.

The fucking years flip by like pages off a cheap calendar.

Order some golf shoes, otherwise we'll never get out of this place alive. Impossible to walk in this muck. No footing at all.

As long as I'm learning something, I figure I'm OK - it's a decent day.

One of the few ways I can almost be certain I'll understand something is by sitting down and writing about it. Because by forcing yourself to write about it and putting it down in words, you can't avoid having your say on the subject. You might be wrong, but you have to think.

Everything is possible, once you strive towards it.