Neil Strauss · 431 pages
Rating: (25.5K votes)
“On Ecstasy, Joan Rivers looks like Pamela Anderson, so imagine what Pamela Anderson looked like.”
“Looking down on it from the helicopter, with a bottle of Jack in my left hand, a bag of pills in my right hand, and a blond head bobbing up and doen in my lap, I felt like the king of the world.”
“There was one dude in a jeans jacket who I swear to God shit in his pants when all of a sudden I was inches away from his face playing drums in the air.”
“I've already spent ten years of my life apologizing for that band. As their manager, that's all I really did. Apologize. For years afterward I'd walk into a hotel lobby and the receptionist would call to me, 'Mr. McGhee.' And I'd run up and drop to my knees and say, 'Oh, Jesus, I'm really sorry.'
They'd look at me funny and say, 'No, nothing's wrong. You have a telephone call.'
And I'd breathe a sigh of relief and thank the good Lord above that I wasn't managing Mötley Crüe anymore.
~ Doc McGhee.”
“There were always blind, deaf, or handicapped people hanging around the brothers, and I figured it was evidence that they either had a soft, compassionate side or were running some kind of mysterious scam.”
“The angry man will defeat Himself in battle As well as in life.”
“We thought we had elevated animal behavior to an art form. But then we met Ozzy.”
“But what everybody always loved Mötley Crüe for was being a fucking decadent band: for being able to walk in a room and inhale all the alcohol, girls, pills, and trouble in sight.”
“I announced to everyone that I was embarking on a solo tour. Not a music tour, but a tour of drugs and prostitutes.”
“I just wanted peace and quiet. So I waded into the ocean with a bellar in my hand. The waves were cold and kept smacking my clothes, higher and higher, until they knocked my drink out of my hand. Soon, my hair was wet and sticking to the back of my neck. Then I blacked out.”
“If there’s one genetic trait that automatically disqualifies a man from being able to rock, it’s curly hair. Nobody cool has curly hair; people like Richard Simmons, the guy from Greatest American Hero, and the singer from REO Speedwagon have curls. The only exceptions are Ian Hunter from Mott the Hoople, whose hair is more tangled than curly, and Slash, but his hair is fuzzy and that’s cool.”
“Did you get your presents from me?" I asked.
"Nikki." Doc grimaced. "You're sick. I answered the door, and there were two girls in Nazi outfits and a nun. What's wrong with you?"
"Fuck, Doc. I was just having fun. How about you, Mr. Udo? Did you enjoy your gifts?"
"My wife is like my air," he said.
"Huh?"
"Without her, I cannot live, She is my air."
I stood there feeling like a giant prick. I had tried to contaminate his air.”
“I understood then why rock stars have such big egos: from the stage, the world is just one faceless, shirtless, obedient mass, as far as the eye can see.”
“Fate, however, has a way of finding your vulnerabilities where you least expect them, illuminating them so that you realize how glaringly obvious they are, and then mercilessly driving a spike straight into their most delicate center.”
“Nowadays, I don’t believe in the Christian concept of a God who created people for the sole purpose of judging and punishing them. After all, if one of the commandments is “Thou shalt not kill,” does that make God a hypocrite when he does things like flooding the world or destroying Sodom and Gomorrah?”
“But, unlike us, Ozzy had a restraint, a limit, a conscience, a brake. And that restraint came in the form of a homely, rotund little British woman whose very name sets lips trembling and knees knocking: Sharon Osbourne, a shitkicker and disciplinarian like no other we had ever met, a woman whose presence could in an instant send us reeling back to our childhood fear of authority.”
“Those words—“Trust me, I’m a junkie”—should have been a clue right there.”
“A funny thing about girls, though, is that the more you do wrong, the more they like you.”
“I have made a discovery,' said Giskard, his voice carrying no shade of emotion. 'I have made it because, for the first time in my existence, I faced thousands of human beings. Had I done this two centuries ago, I would have made the discovery then. Had I never faced so many at once, then I would never have made the discovery at all.
'Consider, then, how many vital points I might easily grasp, but never have and never will, simply because the proper conditions for it will never come my way. I remain ignorant except where circumstance helps me, and I cannot count on circumstance.”
“He'd was called first Cephas in Aramaic, then Petros, rock, in Greek. Eventually he became Peter and the Gospels proclaimed that Christ said, Upon this rock I shall build my church.'
The testimony was the first ancient account he'd ever read that made sense. No supernatural events or miraculous apparitions. No actions contrary to history or logic. No inconsistent details that cast doubt on credibility. Just the testimony by a simple fisherman of how he'd borne witness to a great man, one whose good works and kind words lived on after his death, enough to inspire him to continue the cause.”
“What does it say?" asked my lord.
"It says, `Good-night, God keep you all the night!'--just what she used to say when we were together. Every night she used to say that to me, and every morning she said, `God bless you all the day!' So you see I am quite safe all the time----”
“The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo. …where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings?” (pp.281-82)”
“Since the devil became the lord of illusions. It's very easy to do evil deeds when you are trying to do good.”
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