Quotes from Hunter S. Thompson

Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something, croak this awful habit of not ever getting to the end- of anything.

When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don't waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies.

As for LSD, I highly recommend it. We had a fine, wild weekend and no trouble at all. The feeling it produces is hard to describe. 'Intensity' is a fair word for it. Try half a cube at first, just sit in the living room and turn on the music - after the kids have gone to bed. But never take it in uncomfortable or socially tense situations. And don't have anybody around whom you don't like.

There was also the socio-psychic factor. Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a pint of ether.

The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes.

Relax - This won't hurt.

Drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested.

I wondered if maybe this kind of thing happened all the time in Vegas -- cars full of late-arriving passengers screeching desperately across the runway, dropping off wild eyed Samoans clutching mysterious canvas bags who would sprint onto planes at the last possible second and then roar off into the sunrise.

Every time I think of Tim Leary I get angry. He was a liar and a quack and a worse human being than Richard Nixon. For the last twenty-six years of his life he worked as an informant for the FBI and turned his friends into the police and betrayed the peace symbol he hid behind.

Hit him again, Jack! He's crazy!

But from now on let's try to be careful when we're around people I know. You won't sketch them and I won't Mace them. We'll just try to relax and get drunk.

I was glad to be rid of him. He was one of those people who could go to New York and be fascinating, but here in his own world he was just a cheap functionary, and a dull one at that.

I'm bound to go to heaven because I've already served my time in hell.

You'd better take care of me, Lord. If you don't, you're gonna have me on your hands.

To give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal — to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people, anyway. For years I've regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.

On the way down the hill we walked three abreast in the cobblestone street, drunk and laughing and talking like men who knew they would separate at dawn and travel to the far corners of the earth.

These are bad times for people who like to sit outside the library at dawn on a rainy morning and get ripped to the tits on crank and powerful music.

It was wonderful, a stunning happy ending to what began as another tragic rock & roll story, as if Bob Dylan had been arrested in Miami for jacking off in a seedy little XXX theater while stroking the spine of a fat young boy.

I have never believed much in luck, and my sense of humor has tended to walk on the dark side.

Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.

The line between madness and masochism was already hazy;

I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.

I suspect we could have done the whole thing on acid … except for some of the people; there were faces and bodies in that group who would have been absolutely unendurable on acid.