Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

One of the advantages of being dead, I guess, is that somebody else can edit all this.

At the top of the mountain we are all snow leopards.

How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection.

No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.

Sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind but falling in love and not getting arrested.

All golfers fear the one-iron. It has no angle, no loft. The one-iron is a confidence-crusher, a fear trip, an almost guarantee of shame, failure, dumbness and humiliation if you ever use it in public.

All advice can only be a product of the man who gives it.

Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop.

I guess that's one of the things about growing up in the fifties - it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be at least as successful as your parents.

I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway.

God's mercy on you degenerate swine.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

These things happen. One day you run everything, and the next day you run like a dog.

In my heart, I am always a Raider.

The trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to have around, especially as President.

As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'you are nothing', I will be a writer.

In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

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.

This is the fast lane, folks...and some of us like it here.

I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits - and millions of Americans agree with me.

Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why.

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.

No music plus Bad TV = Bad mood & no pages.

You can't hoard fun. It has no shelf life.

Hit him again, Jack! He's crazy!

Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?

My greatest talent is in my ability to choose good friends. It's about as important as things get.

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!

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

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me

I don't think that my kind of journalism has ever been universally popular. It's lonely out here.

As long as I'm learning something, I figure I'm OK - it's a decent day.

To make a point of declaring friendship is to cheapen it. For men's emotions are very rarely put into words successfully.

Things are no longer what they seem to be. My telephones are haunted, and animals whisper at me from unseen places.

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

The massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.

I've already become a mastodon in print - I don't see a consciousness for my kind of journalism.

If you work in either journalism or politics... you will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways-but it doesn't hurt as much when you're right.

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

As you were, I was. As I am, you will be.

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.

Writing is the flip side of sex - it's good only when it's over.

Platitudes are safe, because they're easy to wink at, but truth is something else again.

One of the most basic factors in sports is that winning becomes a habit, and losing is the same way. When failure starts to feel normal in your life or your work or even your darkest vices, you won't have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will find you. Count on it.

Timothy Leary and I kept the same hours. He believed, as I do, that “After midnight, all things are possible.

Today's pig is tomorrows bacon!

Life is beautiful and living is pain.

Those who fail to learn from the brutal stompings visited on them in the past are doomed to be brutally stomped in the future.

I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking - which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.

Just sick enough to be totally confident

Turn the goddam music up! My heart feels like an alligator!

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.

Hope rises and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain.

[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.

Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer... in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

"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.

We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.

If you get people asking the wrong questions, you don't have to worry about the answers.

["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.