Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

337 Sourced Quotes

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 have always needed fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.

Hunter S. Thompson
Gonzo journalism... is a style of "reporting" based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism—and the best journalists have always known this.

Hunter S. Thompson
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...

Hunter S. Thompson
The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks... [Censorship of the news] is a given in wartime, along with massive campaigns of deliberately-planted "Dis-information". That is routine behavior in Wartime — for all countries and all combatants — and it makes life difficult for people who value real news.

Hunter S. Thompson
Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.

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

Hunter S. Thompson
Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. For years I've regarded his existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine.

Hunter S. Thompson
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.

Hunter S. Thompson
The downward spiral of Dumbness in America is about to hit a new low.

Hunter S. Thompson
"Mayblossom Senility" (Steadman's phrase)... burnt out early or maybe just not much to burn in the first place. Not much energy in the faces, not much curiosity. Suffering in silence, nowhere to go after thirty in this life, just hang on and humor the children. Let the young enjoy themselves while they can. Why not?

Hunter S. Thompson
The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.

Hunter S. Thompson
Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.

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

Hunter S. Thompson
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!

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

Hunter S. Thompson
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.

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

Hunter S. Thompson
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.

Hunter S. Thompson
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.

Hunter S. Thompson
I was kind of relieved with the way the book [The Proud Highway] came out. It's beyond an autobiography or a biography. I never knew what was going to come up next.

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

Hunter S. Thompson
The regrets I have are so minor. You know, would I leave my Keith Richards hat, with the silver skull on it, on the stool at the coffee shop at LaGuardia? I wouldn't do that again. But overall, no, I don't have any regrets.

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

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

Hunter S. Thompson
North Vegas is where you go if you're a hooker turning forty and the syndicate men on the strip decide you're no longer much good for business out there with the high rollers.

Hunter S. Thompson
Jim Harrison is someone I always enjoy, one of the great contemporary writers. I like Tim Ferris' Big Boom Theory. I'm getting into a different kind of reading, not straight novels.

Hunter S. Thompson
Revenge is one of the few things in politics that never gets lost in the mail or written off for a dime on the dollar like losers' campaign debts or pledges to help the Poor.

Hunter S. Thompson
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?

Hunter S. Thompson
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.

Hunter S. Thompson
Anybody who thinks that 'it doesn't matter who's President' has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid war on the other side of the world

Hunter S. Thompson