Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.
Faster, Faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.
This is the fast lane, folks…and some of us like it here.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
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?
I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.
I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again…
If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.
In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
America…just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable
A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long.
What do you want? Where’s the goddamn ice I ordered? Where’s the booze? There’s a war on, man! People are being killed!
In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.
The waitress had the appearance of a very old hooker who had finally found her place in life
Writing is the flip side of sex – it’s only good when it’s over.
Politics is the Art of Controlling Your Enviroment.
The brutal reality of politics would be probably intolerable without drugs.
Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.
Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.
…if that Watergate case ever gets into court, he might get very nervous.
I hate pain, despite my ability to tolerate it beyond all known parameters, which is not necessarily a good thing.
Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they’re attached to dollar signs – unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.
It was almost May. I knew that New York was getting warm now, that London was wet, that Rome was hot — and I was on Vieques, where it was always hot and where New York and London and Rome were just names on a map.
I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.
Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.
This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails–eat the wounded. In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
No one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that’s what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You’ll have lots of company.
The reefer butt is called a ‘roach’ because it resembles a cockroach… cockroach… cockroach…
Well,” he said. “I hope to God I never make forty — I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.
Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.
I felt a little guilty about jangling the poor bugger’s brains with that evil fantasy. But what the hell? Anybody who wanders around the world saying, “Hell yes, I’m from Texas,” deserves whatever happens to him.
I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people would believe.
On the way down the hill we walked three abreast in the cobblestone street, drunk and laughing and talking like men who knew they would separate at dawn and travel to the far corners of the earth.
Justice is not cheap in this country, and people who insist on it are usually either desperate or possessed by some private determination bordering on monomania.
We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.
We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts.
I am a child of the American Century, and I feel a genetic commitment to understanding why it happened, and why I take it so personally.
The person who doesn’t scatter the morning dew will not comb grey hairs
The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes.
A totally befuddled voter may look at a Vote for McGovern sign and do just that.
It was necessary, we felt, to thoroughly terrify our opponents, so that even in hollow victory, they would learn to fear every sunrise …
I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling.
I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague that there was no sense talking about it.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.
How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection..
What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up – whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time.
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.
They claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.
There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.
On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.
You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways–but it doesn’t hurt as much when you’re right.
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.
Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.
Victory is a fleeting thing in the gambling business. Today’s winners are tomorrow’s blinking toads, dumb beasts with no hope.
I have never believed much in luck, and my sense of humor has tended to walk on the dark side.
The best thing about the Kentucky Derby is that it is only two minutes long. It is the quickest event in sports, except for Sumo-wrestling & Mike Tyson fights. Maybe Drag-racing is quicker, but I have never been attracted to it.
February is always a bad month for TV sports. Football is gone, basketball is plodding along in the annual midseason doldrums, and baseball is not even mentioned.
The behavior of the crowd at Churchill Downs is like 100,000 vicious Hyenas going berserk all at once in a space about the size of a 777 jet or the White House lawn.
I am a generous man, by nature, and far more trusting than I should be. Indeed. The real world is risky territory for people with generosity of spirit. Beware.
Nixon was a bad loser. He hated losing worse than death, and that is why I enjoyed him. We were both football fans, both addicts; and on some days, nothing else mattered.
The person who doesn’t scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.
Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.
As long as I’m learning something, I figure I’m OK – it’s a decent day.
It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.
I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.
The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.
Good news is rare these days, and every glittering ounce of it should be cherished and hoarded and worshipped and fondled like a priceless diamond.
No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.
The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.
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.
There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment.
‘Crazy’ is a term of art; ‘Insane’ is a term of law. Remember that, and you will save yourself a lot of trouble.
Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.
Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is.
Politics is the art of controlling your environment.
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.
America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
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.
Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common.