Quotes from Hunter S. Thompson

The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights 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.

Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives... and to the "good life", whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.

If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.

Some may never live, but the crazy never die.

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.

It never got weird enough for me.

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name. Remembered line from a long- forgotten poem

Good people drink good beer.

Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.

Freedom is something that dies unless it's used.

No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt

There is no fool like a careless gambler who starts taking victory for granted.

By any accepted standard, I have had more than nine lives. I counted them up once, and there were 13 times I almost and maybe should have died.

Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.

Nixon represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.

Anything worth doing is worth doing well.

Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.

I have always loved blizzards, if only because of the driving experience - which is definitely an acquired taste.

Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception.