William McKeen Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

But he discovered his success later, when he began to write just like he talked.

William McKeen
Perhaps the heart of the American Dream was found in the search.

William McKeen
One of Hunter's first acts upon moving to Colorado was serving as best man at Billy's wedding to Anne Willis. Aside from Hunters putting out his cigarette in the holy water, the wedding transpired without major incident.

William McKeen
The latest firing had put him at a crossroads: he could continue with the fantasy of being a writer, or he could actually make the commitment.

William McKeen
This writing wasn't painful. It was like being high.

William McKeen
And whether he wanted to be or not, he was famous.

William McKeen
He wrote his mother that he had begun to hate the sight of his typewriter.

William McKeen
Some of the locals began to think that maybe Hunter was getting out of control.

William McKeen
Now the ashes drifted, as Hunter must have known they would, back toward the guests standing in front of the viewing pavilion. As the guests stood holding their glasses, the ash floated and settled into their drinks.

William McKeen
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is perfect in the same way that The Great Gatsby is perfect. Take a pencil and read these books, looking for something that doesn't sound right, something you'd want to change. You'll leave the page untouched.

William McKeen
Hunter couldn't stop working. McCumber remembered Hunter working nine days without sleep.

William McKeen
He taught himself to write, retyping books by writers he admired: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner... the usual heavyweights. He said he wanted to get inside the rhythm of their language and find his own stlye.

William McKeen
The lifestyle of the character he had created had consumed him.

William McKeen
The Dream obsessed him... but what was it? Was it Horatio Alger, rags to riches, the idea that you could start with nothing and end up rolling naked in stacks of hundreds? Or was it a dream of freedom? Personal freedom... or the concept of freedom that the founders brought into the whole world?

William McKeen
For a man complaining about the agony of celebrity, he wasn't doing anything to stop perpetuating his image as America's premier outlaw journalist.

William McKeen
His legions of stoned admirers probably really thought he took a hundred hits of acid before sitting down to write. But the craftsmanship those close to him saw as he agonized over his words spoke to how much went into making it look like a breeze.

William McKeen
In these letters to Ridley, Hunters Gonzo style began to rear its head. One of the characteristics of the style Hunter developed was his preoccupation of getting the story. In fact, getting the story became the story. His writing could be classified as metajournalism, journalism about the process of journalism.

William McKeen
Barger thought Hunter provoked Junkie George so that the beating could be used as a gimmick to promote the book.

William McKeen
Nothing infuriates an academic more than a talented and successful colleague.

William McKeen
He kept growing. He thought it was very important to keep growing all your life.

William McKeen
Hunter was picked as a promising electronics technician because he aced the Air Force radio-tech exam. Hunter shrugged off the the triumph. Tests were easy. You didn't have to know about radio and electronics; you just needed to be savvy in answering multiple-choice questions. He scored so high, the military thought he was the second coming of Marconi.

William McKeen
His journalism was usually about journalism: no matter what he started out off writing about, he ended up writing about Hunter Thompson trying to cover a story.

William McKeen
To the generation of young political reporters, Hunter was Mount Rushmore, a living god on earth.

William McKeen
Life as Hunter Thompson's mother was no weenie roast.

William McKeen
To create a balance of power and pedigree in the house, Hunter sent five bucks off to an ad he'd seen in the back pages of a magazine and received his mail-order doctor-of-divinity degree. He began referring to himself as Dr. Thompson and punctuated remarks with his afterword: "I am, after all, a doctor." Friends picked up on the joke, and he was "the Good Doctor" for the rest of his life.

William McKeen