Hunter S. Thompson (1937 – 2005)
American journalist and author famous for his flamboyant writing style, known as Gonzo Journalism, which blurred the distinctions between writer and subject, fiction and non-fiction.
The stewardess reached down to fasten Bloor's seatbelt. I saw his left arm snake out and settle affectionately around her shoulders. Good God! I thought. This is it. I could see the headlines in tomorrow's News. But the stewardess only smiled and backed off a few steps, dismissing Bloor's crude advance with a slap at his arm and an icy professional smile. I tried to return it, but my face was not working properly.
If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too many objective journalists on that list. H. L. Mencken was not objective. Mike Royko, who just died. I. F. Stone was not objective. Mark Twain was not objective. I don't quite understand this worship of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different from being subjective.
Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.
I take no pleasure in being Right in my dark predictions about the fate of our military intervention in the heart of the Muslim world. It is immensely depressing to me. Nobody likes to be betting against the Home team.
To Richard Milhous Nixon, who never let me down.
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...
Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol... but too many adrenaline rushes in any given time span has the same effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start burning out the circuits. When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, its only a matter of time before he gets smashed — and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.
Jesus, I thought, I am ripped right straight to the tits. Where am I? Are we going up or down? Somewhere in the back of my brain, I knew I was sitting in a jeep in the parking lot of a night club on an island off the Mexican coast — but how could I really be sure, with another part of my brain apparently convinced that I was looking down on the huge glittering bowl of Los Angeles from the cockpit of a 727? Was that the Milky Way? Or Sunset Boulevard? Orion, or the Beverly Hills Hotel?
Richard Nixon could tell us a lot about peaking too early. He was a master of it, because it beat him every time. He never learned and neither did Bush the Elder.
Ed: Rip up the streets?
HST: With jackhammers.
Ed: With jackhammers?
It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with a balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened. I felt a tremendous distance between me and everything real.
Satan's Slaves, number three in the outlaw hierarchy, custom-bike specialists with a taste for the flesh of young dogs, flashy headbands and tender young blondes with lobotomy eyes.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
Now, years later, I still have trouble when I think about Chicago ('68). That week at the Convention changed everything I'd ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it... Everytime I tried to tell somebody what happened in Chicago I began crying , and it took me years to understand why... Chicago was the End of the Sixties, for me.
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.
You'd be surprised at the things people will do in order to get their names or pictures in the paper.
Hunter was an enigma all his life. He puzzled his mother, who wondered why he did the things he did. But she understood that her eldest son had magnetism. After he became famous, she was saying his charisma was there all along, although he was difficult from the moment of his birth. Life as Hunter Thompson's mother was no weenie roast.
He was a pain in the ass. He was fearless. He was cruel, but also capable of great kindness. He was a loyal friend. Near the end, he was frequently sentimental. Sometimes brusque and rude, he could also be a courtly southern gentleman. Virginia Thompson had worked overtime to raise sons with good manners.
The utter collapse of this Profoundly criminal Bush conspiracy will come none too soon for people like me... The massive plundering of the U.S. Treasury and all its resources has been almost on a scale that is criminally insane, and has literally destroyed the lives of millions of American people and American families. Exactly. You and me, sport — we are the ones who are going to suffer, and suffer massively. This is going to be just like the Book of Revelation said it was going to be — the end of the world as we knew it.
The city's frightening now. That's the basis of my reaction to Las Vegas. It's not the city I wrote about. It's not the same place at all. You'll notice that even the — what do you call them? — milestone or trademark casinos are now gone.