Top 518 Quotes & Sayings by Hunter S. Thompson - Page 7

Jesus man! You don't look for acid! Acid finds you when it thinks you're ready.

The first time I managed to pick up a basketball I knew I was destined to lead the UK to another National championship. ... Even now, so many years later, I still believe Kentucky will go undefeated in March & win everything.

In the terms of our Great Society the Hell's Angels and their ilk are losers - dropouts, failures and malcontents. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with a world in which they are only a problem.The Hell's Angels are not visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners or the vanguard of anything it is not the "moral revolution" in vogue on college campuses, but a fast-growing legion of young unemployables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the same kind of destructive outlet that "outlaws" like the Hell's Angels have been finding for years.

Old God sure was in a good mood when he made this place.

There's also a down side.

People think I watch TV too much, but they are wrong. There is a huge difference between merely "watching" TV and learning to respond aggressively to it. The difference, for most people, is the difference between the living and dying of their own brains.

Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers.

Fishing from a boat seems like dilettante bullshit - like hunting wild boar with a can of spray paint from the safety of a pick-up truck

The waitress had the appearance of a very old hooker who had finally found her place in life

Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes.

I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

[Polo Is My Life] is what's called a sex book - you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll. It's about the manager of a sex theater who's forced to leave and flee to the mountains. He falls in love and gets in even more trouble than he was in the sex theater in San Francisco. Most of my stories are tales of anguish, stress and grief.

Don't have sex in the lobby - it's usually awkward.

I was once arrested with [Allen] Ginsburg. He was a big help to me. He was one of the few people who read unknown writer's work. Maybe he was just hustling me. He liked to flirt, Allen. They called him a monster but he was only falling in love.

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody understands at the time--and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

Why are we seeing George Bush on TV every two hours for nine or ten days at a time, like some kind of mutated Mr. Rogers clone? Something is dangerously wrong in any country where a monumentally-failed backwoods politician can scare our national TV networks so totally that they will give him anything he wants.

The first paragraph. The last paragraph. That's where the story is going and how it's going to end. Or else you'll go off in a hundred different directions.

The thing that was important to me about Hemingway at the time was that Hemingway taught me that you could be a writer and get away with it.

The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel-white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.

I'm doing an introduction for one of Ralph's [Steadman] books. He's doing something called Gonzo, the Art I think he's stealing from me. I like Steadman and his coattail abilities. Ralph is better at business than I am. He has always managed to get free whiskey.

If you have half a story and you don't know the rest, you use what you have to pry the rest out of someone.

We came out here to find the American Dream, and now that we're right in the vortex you want to quit ... You must realize that we've found the main nerve." I know," he said. "That's what gives me the Fear.

Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbators/gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers ... house-whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd.

Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix & a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get.

Bill Clinton does not inhale marijuana, right? You bet. Like I chew on LSD but I don't swallow it.'

Journalism, to me, is just another drug - a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight.

I guess I'm just courtly until people get in my way. You'll find most Southerners are like that.

I think George Washington owned guns. I've never seen any contradiction with that.

Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

All energy flows according to the whims of the great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy him.

Children are like TV sets. When they start acting weird, whack them across the head with a big rubber basketball shoe.

Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach

Cover a war in a place where you can't drink beer or talk to a woman? Hell no!

With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever. Always thinking that just behind some narrow door in all of his favorite bars, men in red woolen shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know.

Relax - This won't hurt.

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 was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right.

You can't miss what you never had.

Still humping the American Dream

There is no way to understand the public reaction to the sight of a Freak smashing a coconut with a hammer on the hood of a white Cadillac in a Safeway parking lot unless you actually do it, and I tell you it's tense.

The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It's come to the point where you almost can't run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.

I think you either have to have a very strong decisive person at the top or else a really brilliant staff command.

They're gonna make it look like suicide. I know how those bastards think.

But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country-but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.

He wandered into the Newsroom and asked for a job the same way he’d walk into a barbershop and ask for a haircut, and with no more idea of being turned down.

Stay naked as much as possible, but do not impose your orgiastic will on others. Don't have sex in the lobby - it's usually awkward.

There is probably some long-standing "rule" among writers, journalists, and other word-mongers that says: "When you start stealing from your own work you're in bad trouble." And it may be true.

["Where the Buffalo Roam" is] horrible pile of crap. [Bill] Murray did a good job. But it was a bad script. You can't beat a bad script. It was just a horrible movie. A cartoon. But Bill Murray did a good job. We actually wrote and shot several different endings and beginnings and they all got cut out in the end. It was disappointing.

It was a maddening image and the only way to whip it was to hang on until dusk and banish the ghosts with rum.

But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.

I've been studying drugs for years.

Any kind of political campaign that taps the kind of energy that nothing else can reach would generate a tremendous high for everybody involved in it.

As hideous and dumb as it sounds, I wouldn't be at all surprised by an invasion of Iraq on September II. I'll take a long shot bet on that.

That's where Time magazine lives ... way out there on the puzzled, masturbating edge, peering through the keyhole and selling what they see to the big wide world of chamber of commerce voyeurs who support the public prints.

Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.

I am a writer, a professional journalist with serious credentials in Crime, Craziness, and Politics. I have mingled with dangerous criminals and attended many trials . . . from Hell's Angels, Black Panthers and Chicano street fighters to Roxanne Pulitzer and even Richard Nixon, back in the good old days before he was run out of the White House for fraud, perjury, graft, and criminal negligence.

Good peo­ple drink good beer. Just look around any pub­lic bar­room and you will see: Bad peo­ple drink bad beer. Think about it.

I never claimed to be anything more than a nice guy and an athlete.