Gonzo Quotes

“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?”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's

“Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested . . . Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's

“Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Curse of Lono

“Happy," I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception – especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far to relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“I'm just saying it's not all sand castles and ninjas.”
― Libba Bray, Going Bovine

“At the top of the mountain we are all snow leopards.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

“An outlaw can be defined as somebody who lives outside the law, beyond the law and not necessarily against it.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people would believe.”
― Hunter S Thompson, Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“You don't know me, dude," he says, not smiling this time. Gonzo examines his cards, prepping for his next move. "People always think that they know other people, but they don't. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won't eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don't know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel ****ed up for no reason at all.”
― Libba Bray, Going Bovine

“I bought a small bottle of beer for fifteen cents and sat on a bench in the clearing, feeling like an old man. The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories - not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without first-expierience is a fool and a fraud.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels

“I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“Lucy paints portraits of Barbara Streisand.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“(On choosing to write the book in third person, and using his name Norman as the nom de plume)

NOW, OUR MAN of wisdom had a vice. He wrote about himself. Not only would he describe the events he saw, but his own small effect on events. This irritated critics. They spoke of ego trips and the unattractive dimensions of his narcissism. Such criticism did not hurt too much. He had already had a love affair with himself, and it used up a good deal of love. He was no longer so pleased with his presence. His daily reactions bored him. They were becoming like everyone else’s. His mind, he noticed, was beginning to spin its wheels, sometimes seeming to repeat itself for the sheer slavishness of supporting mediocre habits. If he was now wondering what name he ought to use for his piece about the fight, it was out of no excess of literary ego. More, indeed, from concern for the reader’s attention. It would hardly be congenial to follow a long piece of prose if the narrator appeared only as an abstraction: The Writer, The Traveler, The Interviewer. That is unhappy in much the way one would not wish to live with a woman for years and think of her as The Wife.

Nonetheless, Norman was certainly feeling modest on his return to New York and thought he might as well use his first name — everybody in the fight game did. Indeed, his head was so determinedly empty that the alternative was to do a piece without a name. Never had his wisdom appeared more invisible to him and that is a fair condition for acquiring an anonymous voice.”
― Norman Mailer, The Fight

“Treat life as a suicide mission, take on the impossible jobs and attack with the gusto of someone who has nothing to lose.... and when you revel in victory, make like it's a dirty win”
― josh stern, And That's Why I'm Single: What Good Is Having A Lucky Horseshoe Up Your Butt When The Horse Is Still Attached?

“We are drifting into some ugly parallels here, and if I'd written this kind of thing two years ago I'd pick up the New York Times and see myself mangled all over the Op-Ed page... And then beaten into a bloody coma the next evening by some hired thugs in an alley behind the National Press Building.....”
― Hunter Thompson

“Las Vegas and the American Dream: two ideas intertwined like crossed fingers on a bloated corpse.”
― Jonathan Heatt, Teaching Snapping Turtles How To Chew Bubblegum

“من يجعل من نفسه وحشًا، يتخلص من ألم الإنسانية”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“*btw, thanks banget karena kalian tuh buku jelek banget kok bisa laku juga ya...hahahay”
― Bunga Mawar maafin Ilham ya...

“Maaf, buku ini hanya dijual di Gramedia, jadi sangat tak mungkin apabila buku ini Anda bilang "bisa ditukar"..hehehe”
― Bunga Mawar maafin Ilham ya...

“The proper bookmark for a Hunter Thompson book is a pair of brass knuckles.”
― Jonathan Heatt

“You don't have to drink this," I said, handing him the champagne. "But Sandy might like it".
"No,no. Come on, let's have some," he grinned, popping the cork, taking a swig from the bottle and passing it back. He [HST] rarely failed to show his appreciation of someone appreciating him, which is an admirable trait.”
― Jay Cowan

“Over the years, we worked on some promising projects that Hunter could do while never leaving the Farm. One was The Gonzo Book of Etiquette, a radical updating of Emily Post that would instruct modern people on such niceties as how to tell your parents that your significant other is a drug dealer; how to cope with partiers or guests who won't leave when the festivities are over; how to respond, legally and shrewdly, to various forms of police interrogation (the „What Marijuana?“ as we called it); what to wear to a wedding between a rock star and a stripper; how to explain what a Deering grinder full of coke is to your mother-in-law; how to get the car keys away from a drunk without being stranded; using guns safely around drug abusers, and so on. I don't know why he was never able to sell that concept.”
― Jay Cowan