A Quote by Anthony Bourdain

I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas - fat, drugged, and completely out of it. — © Anthony Bourdain
I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas - fat, drugged, and completely out of it.
I go to Las Vegas--or at least I went to Las Vegas--because even though I knew everything that was sinister, calculating, and evil about it, I loved Las Vegas. Only in Vegas could I dare to fantasize that I was a Friend of Frank. Or that I was throwing the dice at Dino's favorite table. Or that I might luck out and sip bourbon with Rickles after his last lounge show. The D.I. oozed that kind of heady fantasy.
Tonight, I would like to pay tribute to the greatest entertainer of all time, Mr. Elvis Presley. Elvis was Las Vegas. And if it wasn't for him, so many performers like myself would not have the chance to do what we do in this town. He really was the king.
Being able to walk out of the studio after a week of intense recording and jump into a cold sea and sit in a hot spring and soak for a few hours completely resets the whole system. Really refreshing. For me, it's all about stepping out of the ordinary. Even psychically.
What strikes me as funny about Elvis is that all the impersonators choose to do the Vegas Elvis; not the young, cool guy, always the bloated fool.
After about five hours of pushing, my midwife and my birthing assistant said, 'You know, we have a few suggestions.' And I was like, 'Really? After five hours of pushing you have a few suggestions? You couldn't have told me five minutes in?'
I never envisioned that I would be able to bring something to the entertainment table that would fit Las Vegas. Vegas is so presentational; it's live theater and, for me, it's always been film or television, which isn't why people come to Las Vegas. So it's exciting to be apart of all of this, the thrust of the entertainment of Vegas.
George Klein says that Elvis had five real friends outside of his circle, and I was blessed to be one of them. I spent a lot of time with Elvis in Vegas and at Graceland.
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.
It was my Fat Elvis period. I was eating and drinking like a pig. I was depressed and I was crying out for help. It's real. And I meant it.
I think that Vegas is one of the wildest places I've ever been to. You can look to your left and there's a drag queen getting married by Elvis, to the right there is some old bird sticking quarters into a slot machine for hours.
When I get into the moment of actually feeling like I want to write, to finish something, I do what I've always read authors do, and park myself at a desk and bang things out for three hours. And if I have to throw it all away, I throw it all away.
Unless you turn out to be a shining and ballistic genius, then, trust me, if you want to do this then you're going to be spending the next few years doing little else. This is a thing you do at a table with a notebook and a keyboard, and there's no getting away from it. Put in the hours. You don't get to turn off 'being a writer.'
We separated like oil and water. In the cafeteria, you'd see a table of black jocks, table of white jocks, table of rich white kids, table of Hispanic kids, table of Chinese kids, table of druggies, table of chatterboxes, and so on. Wait! There's a diverse table over there! With a few kids of different tenacities and economic status! Oh, that's the nerds. That's where I sat. We weren't cool enough for the other tables, so we didn't discriminate against anybody.
I would visit Vegas every year when I was a kid. Vegas, to a kid, is a playground, as much as it is to adults. I discovered the magic store in a hotel and would spend hours and hours in there.
I did 'Viva Las Vegas' with Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret. By standing in for Ann-Margret for a week, I learned the feeling of being a star in a musical number.
When I lived in Las Vegas, I was meeting everybody: Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones - we won't go there - but all these people that were working in Vegas a million years ago, way before I was Elvira.
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