35 Quotes by Michael Herr

Or dozing and waking under mosquito netting in a mess of slick sweat, gagging for air that wasn’t 99 percent moisture, one clean breath to dry-sluice your anxiety and the backwater smell of your own body. But all you got and all there was were misty clots of air that corroded your appetite and burned your eyes and made your cigarettes taste like swollen insects rolled up and smoked alive, crackling and wet.

And they were killers. Of course they were; what would anyone expect them to be?

God knows, it's all he ever talked about. It wasn't America he couldn't take. It was LA. The only other two places he knew of to make movies in were New York and London, and New York was too hard and too expensive.

Some people just wanted to blow it all to hell, animal, vegetable and mineral. They wanted a Vietnam they could fit into their car ashtrays.

Maybe nothing's so unfunny as an omen read wrong.

It's a corny old gag about Las Vegas, the temporal city if there ever was one, trying to camouflage the hours and retard the dawn, when everybody knows that if you're feeling lucky you're really feeling time in its rawest form, and if you're not feeling lucky, they've got a clock at the bus station.

What is the difference between the Marine Corps and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.

Every time I had a vision of myself lying dead somewhere, it was up there, in the Highlands.

We came to fear something more complicated than death, an annihilation less final but more complete, and we got out. Becausewe all knew that if you stayed too long you became one of those poor bastards who had to have a war on all the time, and where was that?