"His journalism was usually about journalism: no matter what he started out off writing about, he ended up writing about Hunter Thompson trying to cover a story."

"He taught himself to write, retyping books by writers he admired: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner... the usual heavyweights. He said he wanted to get inside the rhythm of their language and find his own stlye."

"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is perfect in the same way that The Great Gatsby is perfect. Take a pencil and read these books, looking for something that doesn't sound right, something you'd want to change. You'll leave the page untouched."

"I think it's pretty ridiculous to sit back and think that we've changed the horse so much, without realizing that they have changed us an awful lot too."

"Why is it called Piggie-back riding? I'm not a piggie!"

"What does it mean that social structures among young people are so often predicated upon trying really, really hard to appear to not-be-trying?"

"But the truth of the matter is, to live a good life, as a good person, it doesn't matter how you got there. It just matters that you do."

"So you go on and on, with this intellectual fly down, your underwear exposed, and toilette paper hanging out the back of your pants."

"It's almost as if our society values opinion more than it values knowledge."

"I like three-legged dogs, because if I was missing a leg I would be like: „URGH, life sucks when missing a leg. Slow down! I can't walk that fast, I'm missing a freaking leg!!“ And dogs? No! A three legged dog is on it. Exactly the same amount of happy as a four-legged dog! That's why I like three-legged dogs. They have taken their three-leggedness and they embrace it."

"We often just accept the things that we like and complain a lot about the things that we don't like. But if we could, like, intensely dwell on the really great things in life the way we intensely dwell on the negative things in life. I think that would be fantastic."

"If you were a crayon, what color would you most like to make out with?"

"Ursula Le Guin has been a hero of mine for 20 years. She's done so much, and she will continue to do good even though she's gone. I honestly don't know what I would have become if it weren't for Ursula Le Guin. The first time I read "A Wizard of Earthsea" I realized how balance could be even more epic than war. Suddenly, Fantasy wasn't just wish fulfillment and grandeur, it was real and complex."

"Now the ashes drifted, as Hunter must have known they would, back toward the guests standing in front of the viewing pavilion. As the guests stood holding their glasses, the ash floated and settled into their drinks."

"Putting Hunter in context was tough."

"He kept growing. He thought it was very important to keep growing all your life."

"Nothing infuriates an academic more than a talented and successful colleague."

"His legions of stoned admirers probably really thought he took a hundred hits of acid before sitting down to write. But the craftsmanship those close to him saw as he agonized over his words spoke to how much went into making it look like a breeze."

"Hunter couldn't stop working. McCumber remembered Hunter working nine days without sleep."

"Some of the locals began to think that maybe Hunter was getting out of control."

"The lifestyle of the character he had created had consumed him."

"To the generation of young political reporters, Hunter was Mount Rushmore, a living god on earth."

"For a man complaining about the agony of celebrity, he wasn't doing anything to stop perpetuating his image as America's premier outlaw journalist."

"I see that I have too much confined my thoughts to God, and that I ought to go directly to the Saviour's arms, and that I ought to believe, abominable as my sins have been, if they have once been pardoned, they form no partition between me and the heart of Christ."

"Standing on my watch-tower I am commanded, if I see aught of evil coming, to give warning. I solemnly declare that I do discern evil approaching; I see a storm collecting in the heavens; I discover the commotion of the troubled elements; I hear the roar of a distant wind — heaven and earth seem mingled in the conflict — and I cry to those for whom I watch, "A storm! A storm! Get you into the ark or you are swept away. "Oh! what is it I see? I see a world convulsed and falling to ruins — the sea burning like oil — nations rising from under ground — the sun falling — the damned in chains before the bar, and some of my poor hearers among them! I see them cast from the battlements of the judgment scene. My God! the eternal pit has closed upon them forever!"

"The best money can procure for thee is freedom to live in thy true self. It is more apt however to enslave than to liberate. It is good also when thou makest it a means to help thy fellow men; but here too it is easier to harm than to benefit: for the money thou givest another is useful to him only when it stimulates him to self-activity."

"Wouldst thou bestow some precious gift upon thy fellows, make thyself a noble man."

"Agitators and declaimers may heat the blood, but they do not illumine the mind."

"If the young are watched too closely, if they are kept habitually under surveillance, the spring of action is weakened, the power of initiative is destroyed, and they become mediocre, commonplace, mechanical men and women, from whom nothing excellent or distinguished may be expected. Parents and teachers … must so deal with the young as to bring them little by little under the control of reason and conscience; and in this, nothing thwarts more surely than excessive supervision, for it draws attention from the inner view and voice to the eyes of the watchers. It may cultivate a love of decency and propriety, but not the creative feeling that we live with God and that righteousness is life."

"If we are disappointed that men give little heed to what we utter is it for their sake or our own?"

"They who think they know all, learn nothing."

"Be content that others have position, if thou hast ability: that others have riches, if thou hast virtue."

"When with all thy heart thou strivest to live with truth and love, couldst thou do anything better? … If this be thy life, thou shalt not deem it a misfortune to lack the things men most crave and toil for."

"It is a common error to imagine that to be stirring and voluble in a worthy cause is to be good and to do good."

"What we think out for ourselves forms channels in which other thoughts will flow."

"We are not masters of the truth which is borne in upon us: it overpowers us."

"A Wise man knows that much of what he says and does is commonplace and trivial. His thoughts are not all solemn and sacred in his own eyes. He is able to laugh at himself and is not offended when others make him a subject whereon to exercise their wit."

"If thy friends tire of thee, remember that it is human to tire of everything."

"It is the expensiveness of our pleasures that makes the world poor and keeps us poor in ourselves. If we could but learn to find enjoyment in the things of the mind, the economic problems would solve themselves."

"The value of a mind is measured by the nature of the objects it habitually contemplates. They whose thoughts are of trifles are trifling: they who dwell with what is eternally true, good and fair, are like unto God."

"Language should be pure, noble and graceful, as the body should be so: for both are vestures of the Soul."

"The more we live with what we imagine others think of us, the less we live with truth."

"A hobby is the result of a distorted view of things. It is putting a planet in the place of a sun."

"As children must have the hooping cough, the college youth must pass through the stage of conceit in which he holds in slight esteem the wisdom of the best."

"We do not see rightly until we learn to eliminate what we expect or wish to see from what we really see."

"Thought from which no emotion springs is sterile. The knowledge that has no bearing on the conduct of life is vain."

"It is the business of the teacher … to fortify reason and to make conscience sovereign."

"The study of science, dissociated from that of philosophy and literature, narrows the mind and weakens the power to love and follow the noblest ideals: for the truths which science ignores and must ignore are precisely those which have the deepest bearing on life and conduct."

"As the savages whom we have instructed are ready when left to themselves to return to their ancestral mode of life, so our young people quickly forget what they have learned at school, and sink back into the commonplace existence from which a right education would have saved them."

"They whom trifles distract and nothing occupies are but children."