A Quote by Sarah Vowell

Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all about salvation, they are identical, one-dimensional company towns built up by the sheer will of true believers.
The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice -- a sometimes ambiguous choice, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick.
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.
Salvation in its true and full meaning is synonymous with exaltation or eternal life and consists in gaining an inheritance in the highest of the three heavens within the celestial kingdom. With few exceptions this is the salvation of which the scriptures speak. It is the salvation which the saints seek. (Mormon Doctrine, 2nd ed., Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1966, p. 670.)
I love Atlanta. It's a great city with great crews there, but it's really hard to make it into a Las Vegas version of it because it doesn't look at all like Las Vegas.
Las Vegas is the boxing capital. During a Floyd Mayweather fight weekend, you can shop, party, stay out late and do anything you want. The city of Las Vegas has everything.
[On Las Vegas:] ... The City That Never Sleeps. The City That Sins and Smiles and Lives On the Edge. The city where vices become virtues, become what everyone is here to do.
The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.
What was pretty crazy was to plan a wedding around a tour. It felt very getting-hitched-in-Vegas style. It was like, we played a show in Salt Lake City, ran to New Mexico, we got married, and then I was off to Lisbon.
I think as much as the city is changing us, our experience inside the city also changes. I think, a city like Cairo - and it's interesting because yesterday, a friend of mine told me the same this thing about New York - is a city that you can't control. It's very bold and very aggressive, and it will constantly resist any attempt at control. But even though you can't control it, you can find your path within the city. You can come to a better understanding of your relationship with it.
The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that's as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there's so many things I don't know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures - maybe even 18 or 19 of them - when I get on a subway car every day.
When I played a club in Salt Lake City, I complained to the crowd about the low turnout. It's always good to berate the people who paid to see you because you're upset about the people who didn't show up. It's called misplaced anger, and without it, I wouldn't have an act.
Las Vegas is a city of kickbacks. A desert city of greased palms. A place where a $20 bill can buy approval, a $100 bill adulation and $1,000 canonization.
Second City Las Vegas is very different from Second City in Chicago on the main stage, where they do improv sets. That's how they kind of hone material, kind of work up to new material.
I've spent more time in Las Vegas than any other city, almost including L.A. where I live.
In Las Vegas, people seem to believe, the prosperity spawned by tourism and gaming can make them whole, financially and spiritually. Las Vegas now melds fun, work, and wealth, showing a path toward the brightest vistas of the post-industrial world. It is the first city of the twenty-first century.
I love Las Vegas in a way separate from my love of any other American city. For me, growing up, it was a town of many firsts and where I enjoy a level of anonymity.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!