Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

I've been studying drugs for years.

My blood is too thick for California: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate.

Never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.

Just sick enough to be totally confident

I'll call New York for some cash.

A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long.

Kill the body and the head will die.

There are many harsh lessons to be learned from the gambling experience, but the harshest one of all is the difference between having Fun and being Smart.

Yes sir, I am a tortured man for all seasons, as they say, and I have powerful friends in high places. Birds sing where I walk, and children smile when they see me coming.

These things happen. One day you run everything, and the next day you run like a dog.

Timothy Leary and I kept the same hours. He believed, as I do, that “After midnight, all things are possible.

Old God sure was in a good mood when he made this place.

I think George Washington owned guns. I've never seen any contradiction with that.

Weird behavior is natural in smart children, just as curiosity is to a kitten.

Whatever he might have denied me was unimportant; it was the fact that he could deny me anything at all, even what I didn't want

No cop was ever born who wasn't a sucker for a finely-executed high-speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those clover-leaf freeway interchanges.

It's much more fun to run a political campaign than it is to be the candidate.

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

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

There might be some serious fun in politics.

Rude people will now & then ask me why I think I know so much about Politics. I tell them it's because I'm Smart... But that is a lie: The real reason is because I'm an incurable Gambling addict.

Familiarity seems to breed contempt

I’m a word freak. I like words. I’ve always compared writing to music. That’s the way I feel about good paragraphs. When it really works, it’s like music.

[Richard M. Nixon 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 Jews don't beleive in Jesus! Why should I?! WHOOOEEEE!!

The world is still a weird place, despite my efforts to make clear and perfect sense of it.

Though I was careful never to mention it, I began to see a new dimension in everything that happened.

All gamblers lose regularly, but they rarely discuss it in public. Losing is bad for the image, dude. Nobody buys Hot Tips from Losers. Remember that.

One of them is knowing the difference between Morality and Wisdom. Morality is temporary, Wisdom is permanent… Ho ho. Take that one to bed with you tonight.

You can't miss what you never had.

Relax - This won't hurt.

There's also a down side.

The thing that was important to me about Hemingway at the time was that Hemingway taught me that you could be a writer and get away with it.

Children are like TV sets. When they start acting weird, whack them across the head with a big rubber basketball shoe.

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 am an Addictive Personality, they say, a natural slave to passion - and many Doctors have warned me against it. I am a High-risk Patient.

I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes.

I think you either have to have a very strong decisive person at the top or else a really brilliant staff command.

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

I guess I'm just courtly until people get in my way. You'll find most Southerners are like that.

Given my calling I had to stumble across people who felt the same way. I was a young reporter.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don't mind admitting any of them.

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

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

A little bit of this town goes a very long way. After five days in Vegas you feel like you've been here for five years.

Allen [ Ginsberg] was a particular friend, one of my heroes, really. I knew him almost as long as I've been writing.

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

I'd almost prefer [Richard] Nixon. I'd say [Bill] Clinton is every bit as corrupt as Nixon, but a lot smoother.

There may be flies on you and me, but there are no flies on Jesus.

Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these photographs did.