Favorite Hunter S Thompson Quotes

[Obsessed]

My favorite and something I have sorta lived by ever since:

“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.”

 

[Big_Bend]

Song of the Sausage Creature -

That is the attitude of the new-age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn't ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME."

 

[graybeard65]

I was blessed to meet HST in a seedy Denver bar, in the middle of a terrible snow storm - he was genial, eclectic, and genuine...and he'd been my favorite for years by then. My signature line is one of his better quotes -

 

[suave eddie]

Thanks, @suave eddie

I laughed when I read "The entire 'wave speech' in its entirety." given that your location is the "department of redundancy department"!

As for HST, he certainly had a way with words and was, in the words of the song, too fast to live.

I was going to correct it but couldn’t find the edit button.

 

[OmegaWoods]

I was going to correct it but couldn’t find the edit button.

I'm glad you didn't. It made my day.

 

[getbent]

'holy ****, I know all the words to 'Take it Easy''

 

[mikestearns]

Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Bach.

When they were in their heyday, I figured there was something wrong with me because I couldn't stand any of them. I now realize I was right. Like any other era, the Sixties (1964-1975) yielded a hefty array of wretched nonsense.

The worst aftershock of the Sixties, though, was All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum, published in 1986. Most 60's culture was junk food. This wretched book was junk food ten years after its expiration date.

My worst experience during the sixties: Alan Ginsberg gave a reading at my college, then headed over the the English Department building for a specialspecial get together for select English majors. Alan removed his pants, squatted down, and started thrashing away on his little pump organ while reciting Blake's "Songs of Innocence" in a perfect imitation of Butterfly McQueen's voice. It was hideous, and I was a big Blake Guy at the time.

The sixties were a great time to be young, but they generated an awful lot of c---p, much of which persists in the minds of simpering bubbleheads to this very day.

I'l try to post something more cheery next time. I mean, The Whole Earth Catalog was kinda cool, so there's that.

Ginsberg lost me in an interview I read once where he was defending pedophilia. Outside of that he always just struck me as a hack who was in the right place in the right time.

 

[Obsessed]

Song of the Sausage Creature -

A classic. I forgot all about this one. Thanks for the reminder.

 

[Happy Enchilada]

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean the bastards still aren't out to get you."

 

[Blue Bill]

I got to meet him once, I'll never forget it. He gave a speech at UMASS, part author's read, part standup routine, very entertaining. After the performance, he came crashing into the dressing room like Kramer did on Seinfeld. He was big, maybe 6-3 or so, his loud hawaiian shirt soaked in sweat. Without a word, he dove into a large duffel bag on the floor, which was stuffed with wrinkled clothing, hauled out another hawaiian shirt, this one also wrinkled, but relatively dry. After he changed shirts, he produced a pint of whiskey and poured himself some, over ice. Turning to face us, I was there with a couple other people, he looked us up and down, then, exactly like a 3 stooges movie, turned his wrist over to look at his watch, dousing himself with the whiskey, ice cubes rattling across the floor. Mouths open, we watched him dig out a third shirt, and re-pour his drink, finally looking at us as if this was all normal, and saying, "So, how's everybody?" It was like watching a cartoon! After that, he was friendly and generous with his time, I really liked him.

 

[stxrus]

My favorite and something I have sorta lived by ever since:

“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.”

There is a lot of good and bad truth to this....but it is truth.
I never got the chance to see him and I feel somewhat empty on that front. I’ve been a fan forever and felt cheated when he left.
RIP, HST

 

[Addnine]

Ginsberg lost me in an interview I read once where he was defending pedophilia. Outside of that he always just struck me as a hack who was in the right place in the right time.

Yeah, his two big influences, Blake and Whitman, are two of my favorite poets. His poetry to me seems an awkward attempt at amalgamating the two. I like the energy and momentum of "Howl," and "Kaddish" has its moments, but in the end he's a fun figure but nothing special as a poet.

 

[staxman]

So many great ones! Two more to add;

“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”

“We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

 

[Wayne Alexander]

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . .”And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these ******* animals?”

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about,” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

 

[Mr. St. Paul]

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”

Hate to be the one to break it to you, but this is a misquote. Thompson's original passage begins, "The television business is a cruel and shallow money trench..."

Somewhere along the line, somebody swapped out "television" for "music" and here we are.

 

[beyer160]

There's an audiobook version of Fear & Loathing read by Harry Dean Stanton and Jim Jarmusch. It's amazing. Best heard through headphones.

 

[mycroftxxx]

A couple of others have quoted small snippets of this one, but a larger selection is warranted:

“But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right … and that’s when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it … howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica … letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge … 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. Or maybe it’s In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.”

— HST, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, 1968.

 

[Blackmore Fan]

"Buy the ticket, take the ride."

I've actually used that in conversation before.

 

[Blackmore Fan]

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of those books you can read in a day. And you will want to read it again.

I read it about every 5 years. Buried within page after page of that fantastical tale are some real gem observations about human behavior.

By the way, if you're new to Hunter S. Thompson and/or "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", please do yourself a favor--IGNORE the movie that was made under this title. Part of HST's magic was to create a literary vision that works its way into your own imagination and lets YOU fill in the pictures. The movie version is a piece of absolute crap. There's no way to provide film that is better than your own ability to picture the story he tells in the book.

 

[Addnine]

Ginsberg told me Hunter told him Bukowski sucks

Gayle King told me you'd say something like that.