One of the most basic factors in sports is that winning becomes a habit, and losing is the same way. When failure starts to feel normal in your life or your work or even your darkest vices, you won't have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will find you. Count on it.
— Hunter S. Thompson
There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment.
I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it.
There might be some serious fun in politics.
By any accepted standard, I have had more than nine lives. I counted them up once, and there were 13 times I almost and maybe should have died.
Richard Nixon was an evil man - evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.
I wasn't trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn't have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.
I guess that's one of the things about growing up in the fifties - it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be at least as successful as your parents.
I don't think that my kind of journalism has ever been universally popular. It's lonely out here.
Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why.
The trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to have around, especially as President.
If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
A word to the wise is infuriating.
If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge.
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 Raiders of old were vicious and crazy and cruel. Hanging around their locker room was like hanging around the weight room at Folsom Prison.
I was 22 when JFK was murdered, and I will never recover from it... Never.
I hate pain, despite my ability to tolerate it beyond all known parameters, which is not necessarily a good thing.
Nixon represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.
The writer must be a participant in the scene... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.
Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.
I just usually go with my own taste. If I like something, and it happens to be against the law, well, then I might have a problem.
Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn't anticipate.
Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.
Freedom is something that dies unless it's used.
Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.
For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
Politics is the art of controlling your environment.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer - he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.
You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.
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.
I've already become a mastodon in print - I don't see a consciousness for my kind of journalism.
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.
Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairytale artist.
Truth is weirder than any fiction I've seen.
Nixon was no more a saint than he was a great president.
The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.
Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer... in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.
I can't think in terms of journalism without thinking in terms of political ends. Unless there's been a reaction, there's been no journalism. It's cause and effect.
Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.
The world is still a weird place, despite my efforts to make clear and perfect sense of it.
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.
You better take care of me Lord, if you don't you're gonna have me on your hands.
The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.
Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.
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.
The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.
