Hunter S. Thompson - The Great Shark Hunt (1979)

22 Sourced Quotes

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When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Hunter S. Thompson
And in fact the only way I can deal with this eerie situation at all is to make a conscious decision that I have already lived and finished the life I planned to live - and everything from now on will be A New Life, a different thing, a gig that ends tonight and starts tomorrow morning.

Hunter S. Thompson
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.

Hunter S. Thompson
That's where Time magazine lives... way out there on the puzzled, masturbating edge, peering through the keyhole and selling what they see to the big wide world of chamber of commerce voyeurs who support the public prints.

Hunter S. Thompson
I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like f***ing — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.

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
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
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
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
We came down here to see this teddible scene: people all pissed out of their minds and vomiting on themselves and all that and now, you know what? It's us

Hunter S. Thompson
Every deadline was a crisis … No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland … On the other hand, it might easily be something as simple and basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car.

Hunter S. Thompson
Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach

Hunter S. Thompson
The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the election results as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms. There had to be a whole new scene, they said, and the only way to do it was to make the big move — either figuratively or literally — from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury, from pragmatism to mysticism, from politics to dope... The thrust is no longer for "change" or "progress" or "revolution," but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been.

Hunter S. Thompson
In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile – and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep.

Hunter S. Thompson
I returned to the Holiday Inn — where they have a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms — to consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminishing band of yesterday's refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from.

Hunter S. Thompson
It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close…

Hunter S. Thompson
All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name. Remembered line from a long- forgotten poem

Hunter S. Thompson
Most of my friends are into strange things I don't really understand - and with a few shameful exceptions I wish them all well. Who am I, after all, to tell some friend he shouldn't change his name to Oliver High, get rid of his family, and join a Satanism cult in Seattle? Or to argue with another friend who wants to buy a single-shot Remington Fireball so he can go out and shoot cops from a safe distance?

Hunter S. Thompson
In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely.

Hunter S. Thompson
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.

Hunter S. Thompson
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. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there.

Hunter S. Thompson
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.

Hunter S. Thompson