Top 518 Quotes & Sayings by Hunter S. Thompson - Page 9

She was wearing the same clothes, but now she looked haggard and dirty. The delicate illusions that get us through life can only stand so much strain.

I'll call New York for some cash.

John F. Kennedy, who seized the White House from Richard Nixon in a frenzied campaign that turned a whole generation of young Americans into political junkies, got shot in the head for his efforts, murdered in Dallas by some hapless geek named Oswald who worked for either Castro, the mob, Jimmy Hoffa, the CIA, his dominatrix landlady or the odious, degenerate FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The list is long and crazy - maybe Marilyn Monroe's first husband fired those shots from the grassy knoll. Who knows?

I keep my mouth shut now. I've turned into a professional coward.

and he would probably not agree with my conviction that a sense of humor is the main measure of sanity. But who can say for sure? Humor is a very private thing.

I think I'm going to have to get a flying license very soon, and maybe one of those Lear jets. It beats motorcycles all to hell.

What the hell is the sense of trying to hold the Democratic party together, if it's really a party of expediency, something that's put together every four years?

My blood is too thick for California: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate.

I think it might be better to have the President sort of like the King of England - or the Queen - and have the real business of the presidency conducted by ... a city manager-type, a Prime Minister, somebody who's directly answerable to Congress, rather than a person who moves all his friends into the White House and does whatever he wants for four years.

There's no point in getting into politics at all unless you plan to lash things around.

Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

I may sound a little black, but I'm really pretty well adjusted.

Myths and legends die hard in America.

It's much more fun to run a political campaign than it is to be the candidate.

The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.

Kill the body and the head will die.

I measure my life in pages. If I have pages at dawn, it's been a good night.

The McGovern/McCarthy type candidacies have disappointed too many people, because of a disillusionment with the candidates themselves.

"Perceive" is the word that became in the '72 campaign what "charisma" was for the 1960, '64 and even the '68 campaigns. "Perceive" is the new key word. When you say perceive you imply the difference between what the candidate is and the way the public or the voters see him.

The reason most people play golf is to wear clothes they would not be caught dead in otherwise.

You took too much man, too much, too much.

In San Francisco - life goes on. Hope rises and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain. The sound of music floats down a dark street. A young girl looks out a window and wishes she were married. A drunk sleeps under a bridge. It is tomorrow.

There is a progression of understanding vis-à-vis pro football that varies drastically with the factor of distance --physical, emotional, intellectual and every other way. . . Which is exactly the way it should be . . .

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body.

He knew who I was, at that time, because I had a reputation as a writer. I knew he was part of the Bush dynasty. But he was nothing, he offered nothing, and he promised nothing. He had no humor. He was insignificant in every way and consequently I didn't pay much attention to him. But when he passed out in my bathtub, then I noticed him. I'd been in another room, talking to the bright people. I had to have him taken away.

Las Vegas makes Reno seem like your friendly neighborhood grocery store.

You almost have to be a rock star to generate the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.

Ah, fortune and fame shall follow me ... and I shall dwell in the world of the chosen for a few moments of fleeting ecstasy; ere the seven burly lads turn into creditors and hustle me off to debtors' prison at last.

It's the difference between watching a football game between two teams you don't care about, and watching a game where you have some kind of personal identity with one of the teams, if only a huge bet.

Never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.

It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with a balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened.

If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too many objective journalists on that list.

Most of my stuff is just a series of false leads. I'll approach a story as a subject and then make a whole bunch of different runs at the lead. They're all good writing but they don't connect. So I end up having to string leads together.

Journalism is "a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.

I couldn't imagine, and I don't say this with any pride, but I really couldn't imagine writing without a desperate deadline.

I have long admired Ron Whitehead. He is crazy as nine loons, and his poetry is a dazzling mix of folk wisdom and pure mathematics

Any candidate who'd offered a real possibility of an alternative to Nixon - someone with a different concept of the presidency - could have challenged him and come very close to beating him.

The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories – not of things I had done but of things I had 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 envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.