Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

“Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish - a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow - to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested... Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.”

“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.”

“When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it...So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were - the writer.”

“There might be some serious fun in politics.”

“I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people would believe. I am quite sincere about some of the things which people take very lightly, and almost insultingly unconcerned about some of the things which people take most seriously. In short, I am basically antisocial: certainly not to an alarming degree , but just more so than I appear to be.”

“On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.”

“Allen [ Ginsberg] was a particular friend, one of my heroes, really. I knew him almost as long as I've been writing.”

“He had that rare weird electricity about him - that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving normally.”

“Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday.”

“For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.”

“There is something fresh and crisp about the first hours of a Caribbean day, a happy anticipation that something is about to happen, maybe just up the street or around the next corner.”

“Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”

“The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.”

“I'm a relatively respectable citizen. Multiple felon perhaps, but certainly not dangerous.”

“I was 22 when JFK was murdered, and I will never recover from it... Never.”

“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.”

“There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are..These occasions are rare, but they happen - despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths.”

“If we get chased out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, that will be the fifth consecutive Third-world country with no hint of a Navy or an Air Force to have whipped us in the past 40 years.”

“Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed.”

“Sportswriters are a rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks, a gang of vicious monkeys jerking off in a zoo cage... more disgusting by nature than maggots oozing out the carcass of a dead animal.”

“I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone's imagination.”

“This is the way life goes in Big Sur. Waiting for the mail, watching the sea-lions in the surf or the freighters on the horizon, sitting in the tubs at Hot Springs, once in a while a bit of drink - and, most of the time, working at what ever it is that you came here to work on, whether it be painting, writing, gardening or the simple art of living your own life.”

“...the crazy never die.”

“As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES.”

“All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way.”