Quotes from Hunter S. Thompson

Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME.

This world is full of dangerous beasts—but none quite as ugly and uncontrollable as a lawyer who has finally flipped off the tracks of Reason. He will run completely amok—like a Priest into sex, or a narc-squad cop who suddenly decides to start sampling his contraband. Yes

I had been up all night with my old friend Allen Ginsberg, the poet, and we had both slid into the abyss of whiskey madness and full-bore substance abuse. It was wonderful

How many more nights and weird mornings can this terrible shit go on? How long can the body and the brain tolerate this doom-struck craziness?

Twenty years on the outlaw circuit have not done much to mellow his view of the press and the world of devious squares he thinks it represents. He would no more trust a reporter than he would a cop or a judge. To him they are all the same—the running dogs of whatever fiendish conspiracy has plagued him all these years.

Watching TV becomes a full-time job when you can scan 200 channels all day and all night and still have the option of punching Night Dreams into the video machine, if the rest of the world seems dull.

I feel a powerful lust for red salmon. I agreed.

Live steady. Don't fuck around. Give anything weird a wide berth—including people. It's not worth it. I learned this the hard way, through brutal overindulgence.

Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off." —J. Conrad

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride … and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well … maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion:

Tune in, freak out, get beaten. It's all in Kesey's Bible. … The Far Side of Reality. And

It is entirely conceivable—given the known effects of Ibogaine—that Muskie's brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at that crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely when he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs. We

Sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a wolverine.

The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories – not of things I have done but of things I have failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back.

I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger... a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I

It was like a scene from the final hours of the Roman Empire: Everywhere you looked, some prominent politician was degrading himself in public.

McGovern is the only major candidate—including Lindsay and Muskie—who invariably gives a straight answer when people raise these questions. He lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as that of any other politician who insists on telling the truth: He is mocked, vilified, ignored, and abandoned as a hopeless loser by even his good old buddies like Harold Hughes. On

From the very beginning Ihad felt a definite contact with Yeamon, a kind of tenuous understanding that talk is cheap in this league and that a man who knew what he was after had damn little time to find it, much less to sit back and explain himself.

Perhaps Manolete was a hoof fetishist, or suffered from terrible hemorrhoids as a result of long nights in Spanish horn parlors Ã¢â'¬Â¦ but he was a great matador, and it is hard to see how any amount of Freudian theorizing can have the slightest effect on the reality of the thing he did best.

Whatever else might be said about Nixon—and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for Human—he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football.

It was an educated fear of the coming shit-rain

Young George spent more money on one day of his Inauguration Ceremonies than Richard Nixon did on his whole Campaign in 1972—and Nixon was crucified as a Criminal Spendthrift with the ethics of a snake.

When Nixon went into New Hampshire, he was viewed by the pros as just another of these stubborn, right-wing waterheads with nothing better to do.