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Las Vegas Quotes

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Las Vegas Quotes

“The Strip was still lit by a million neon lights, though the crowds on the sidewalk had greatly decreased by this hour. Still, Bosch was awed by the spectacle of light. In every imaginable color and configuration, it was a megawatt funnel of enticement to greed that burned twenty-four hours a day. Bosch felt the same attraction that all the other grinders felt tug at them. Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Even happily married men at least glanced their way, if only for a second, just to get an idea what was out there, maybe give them something to think about. Las Vegas was like that. There was a visceral attraction here. The bold promise of money and sex. But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk. It was where the real gambling took place in this town.”

“Packy watched her walk away, her perfect heart-shaped rear end testing the confines of her tight black dress. There was a God. Packy was now certain of it. How else could such heart-stopping beauty be accounted for? Such a thing could not be the product of a random universe. A flower, maybe. A rainbow, perhaps. But not Venus Versailles.”

“Sympathy? Not for me. No mercy for a criminal freak in Las Vegas. This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails - eat the wounded. 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.”

“As the other two men moved toward the parking lot, Jay turned Ellie so that she had to face him. Now that she was safe and he was able to touch her, the anger burning inside him pushed toward the surface. “We talk here or at home. Your choice.” “Jay…” “No,” he said savagely. “I come home on a break to find a bullshit note from you, throwing away our relationship like it meant nothing, then I find out from Wyatt that you quit with no notice. You’re going to talk about whatever the fuck scared you enough to run. So you get a choice. Here. Or home.” Shifting from one foot to the other and still not looking at him, she finally whispered, “Home.”

“No story about Las Vegas should begin in Vegas. It is a place one goes, often rashly, and from which one returns often poorer in money and richer in experience. It is a crapshoot—pun intended—if the outcome will match the intention. Las Vegas will not disappoint, becoming a story one can tell in a bar, how one got an unfortunate tattoo, or drunkenly married a new acquaintance at the Little Vegas Chapel in front of an Elvis impersonator.”

“I watched men win and I watched them lose. They were playing a straight house. Nothing was loaded. The house took its own little percentage and got rich. Money made in bootlegging and gunrunning and dope smuggling and whoremongering was invested quite properly in an entire town that stood as a monument to human stupidity, a boomtown in the state with the sparsest population and the densest people in the country. Vegas.”

“Already on that highway Las Vegas felt like a dream, fleeing from my memory, growing fuzzier and more unreal with every passing mile of creosote basin rimmed by jagged hills. Will what we call civilization go like that too, a brutal, gleaming, plasticized absurdity that we will recall less with nostalgia than with befuddlement and wonder that a whole species could consent to live that way? There are other ways. It's not too late to find them. One way or another, we will have to.”

“You’ve got to do what interests you. And it can’t matter [how popular it is]—maybe it’s not what’s current now, or what’s being celebrated—but sooner or later people will take notice because it’ll have a vibrancy and a truthfulness to it; it is you, it’s you speaking, it’s you painting. So to me, I thought, why fight it? Let’s see how it goes. I have nothing better to do in this life, so let’s just see where it goes, and where it takes me.”

“My work was very meticulous and very slow as a painter and so the difficulty was—the question that my graduate thesis program had—was “how are you going to make a living doing this?” After I graduated, I continued on in the same way, but I discovered that I was progressing very quickly as an artist, and that before my pieces were done, I was getting tired of them. So I knew I had to find something that moved along quicker, that followed my natural path of growth as an artist.”

“In the beginning of Photoshop and Illustrator—what became Creative Suite—and to me it looked like another tool, another set of tools. And it fit in well with my photography. The photography had been there to support my art, basically, a way of gathering information and images in order to create better paintings.”

“I was sort of collaging and I would think, “Oh, I’ll collage this work and then I’ll paint it.” But as I progressed I began to realize that everything was changing: there were different ways of printing the work, and perhaps there were things I could use to develop the work that didn’t involve painting.”

“Herbert Bayer was a photographer, an architect, a painter, and he was also the inventor of photo montage, as well as one of the originators—and probably the first modern—land artist. And so it was the idea that an artist could do all of these things using the same basic design concepts, and that it didn’t really matter if he was creating a beautiful land sculpture or if he was using photography or painting. He was really making art using the same methods, the same Bauhaus-type methods.”