Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

The car suddenly veered off the road and we came to a sliding halt in the gravel. I was hurled against the dashboard. My attorney was slumped over the wheel. “What’s wrong?” I yelled. “We can’t stop here. This is bat country!

By the time I got to high school I knew what I was gonna do. Mainly because I looked around and saw there wasn't much else I was able to do. I was a criminal. I was a juvenile delinquent.

The best thing about the Kentucky Derby is that it is only two minutes long. It is the quickest event in sports, except for Sumo-wrestling & Mike Tyson fights. Maybe Drag-racing is quicker, but I have never been attracted to it.

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.

Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don't tell them anything.

I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.

In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone.

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.

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

He had come so far from himself that I don't think he knew who he was anymore.

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.

Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I've seen.

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

Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life.

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

The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America (is that it) has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists.

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

I need beaches, and blackness, and moonlit nakedness.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.

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.

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world — a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts.

I didn't know Johnny Depp could act until he played me.

If you can't make yourself understood by your friends, you'll be in trouble when your enemies come for you.

Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for -- but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.

Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.

I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.

There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.

Victory is a fleeting thing in the gambling business. Today's winners are tomorrow's blinking toads, dumb beasts with no hope.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Sixties were an era of extreme reality. I miss the smell of tear gas. I miss the fear of getting beaten.

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

In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile.

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

I've been studying drugs for years.

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

I find that by putting things in writing I can understand them and see them a little more objectively. ... For words are merely tools and if you use the right ones you can actually put even your life in order, if you don't lie to yourself and use the wrong words.

Familiarity seems to breed contempt

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

Las Vegas is the savage heart of the American Dream.

Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why.

...the crazy never die.

You'd be surprised at the things people will do in order to get their names or pictures in the paper.

Ah, lives there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said As he hunched and rolled in his comfortable bed: To hell with the rent . . . I'll drink instead!

Some may never live, but the crazy never die.