Las Vegas is merely another low, drab, sun-baked stucco flatlands town - America has a thousand such, and I've probably seen the shopping centers of a quarter of them - but that one has a hot glittering diseased tumor sticking up in the middle of it. Get a high-floor suite in one of the Strip hotels and look out the window and you see that you're merely in one of a cluster of Crackerjack boxes surrounded by flat-roofed grammar schools and crowded-together trailer camps on a dry flat desert with a circle of low hills at a distance all around, as though this were the world's largest and most filled-in meteor crates. I once heard someone describe Las Vegas as a city built in an ashtray, and that about sums it up.
- Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt, I Know a Trick Worth Two of That, p.227
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