Quotes from Hunter S. Thompson

OF COURSE THIS ONE: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive....

I do it for the music.

I envied Yeamon and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all of my happiness seem dull.

Too weird to live, too rare to die.

For reasons that were never made clear, I blew out my back windows with five blasts of a 12-gauge shotgun, followed moments later by six rounds from a .44 Magnum. It was a prolonged outburst of heavy firing, drunken laughter and crashing glass. Yet the neighbors reacted with total silence.

Two glasses of ice water--with ice.

Life should be made as difficult as possible... So that the victims might develop more character

I was not proud of what I had learned, but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.

The sun was going down behind the scrub hills northwest of the city. A good Kristofferson tune was croaking out of the radio. We cruised back to town through the warm dusk, relaxed on the red leather seats of our electric white Coupe de Ville.

Ia em direção ao ferry e quando cheguei à esquina parei a ver o que ele fazia. Foi a última vez que o vi e lembro-me muito claramente. Caminhou pelo molhe e parou junto ao poste de um candeeiro, a olhar para o mar. O único ser vivo numa cidade morta das Caraíbas: uma figura alta num fato gasto de Palm Beach, o seu único fato, agora cheio de pó e manchado de relva, com os bolsos largos, sozinho num molhe no fim do mundo imerso nos seus pensamentos

Except for the risk, the marijuana situation in California is a lot like the booze situation in the 1920's. Pot is everywhere, thousands of people smoke it as often as they take aspirins. But the fact of illegality has bred a cultishness, a pot underground whose partisans are forced to skulk around like spies, convening in dark rooms to pass their criminal pleasure from hand to nervous hand. Many get high from the sheer risk.

This is the generation that went to war for Mom, God and Apple Butter, the American Way of life. When they came back, they crowned Eisenhower and then retired to the giddy comfort their TV parlors to cultivate the subtleties of American history as seen by Hollywood.

All the while I had been in San Juan I'd condemned it without really disliking it. I felt that sooner or later I would see that third dimension, that depth that makes a city real and that you never see until you've been there awhile.

Fuck it, I said. I'm reading the Funnies.

Thompson was inundated with fan mail and phone calls, which he said was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids.

In Washington, the truth is never told in daylight hours or across a desk. If you catch people when they're very tired or drunk or weak, you can usually get some answers. So I'd sleep days, wait till these people got their lies and treachery out of the way, let them relax

When things turn weird, the weird turn pro.

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side. --Hunter S. Thompson

The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage." ? Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Newt Gingrich had his victory, too. Remember the Republican Revolution of 1994? Now the only people who still have any respect for it are cops, preachers, and creeps who hang out on the fringes of Klan rallies and worship Charlton Heston.

I gave it some thought, then decided he was probably right. There was no sense blowing everything for the sake of some violent ape I'd never even met.

These were the people who made my attorney nervous. Like most Californians, he was shocked to actually see these people from The Outback. Here was the cop-cream from Middle America … and, Jesus, they looked and talked like a gang of drunken pig farmers!

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.

Freud Wept, God cried, Even the Devil was Shamed