Autobiographical Novels

"This is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted."

"What were we doing out here...? What was the meaning of this trip? Did I actually have a big red convertible out there on the street? Was I just roaming around these Mint Hotel escalators in a drug frenzy of some kind, or had I really come out here to Las Vegas to work on a story?"

"Let it roll!" he screamed. "Just as high as the fucker can go! And when it comes to that fantastic bit where the rabbit bites its own head off, I want you to throw that fuckin' radio into the tub with me!"

"The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel-white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange."

"It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant... History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that... There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave... So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

"Sympathy? Not for me. No mercy for a criminal freak in Las Vegas. 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."

"Reading the front page made me feel a lot better. Against that heinous background, my crimes were pale and meaningless. I was a relatively respectable citizen — a multiple felon, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous. And when the Great Scorer came to write against my name, that would surely make a difference. Or would it? I turned to the sports page and saw a small item about Muhammad Ali; his case was before the Supreme Court, the final appeal. He'd been sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to kill "slopes." "I ain't got nothin' against them Viet Congs," he said. Five years."

"It was dangerous lunacy, but it was also the kind of thing a real connoisseur of edge-work could make an argument for. Where, for instance, was the last place the Las Vegas police would look for a drug-addled fraud-fugitive who just ripped off a downtown hotel? Right in the middle of a National District Attorneys' Drug Conference at an elegant hotel on the strip...."

"This will not be a happy run. Not even the Sun God wants to watch. He has gone behind a cloud for the first time in three days. No sun at all. The sky is grey and ugly."

"You'd better take care of me, Lord...because if you don't you're going to have me on your hands."

"The possibility of complete mental and physical collapse is now very real."

"No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten. p. 89"

"Well, I thought. This is how the world works. All energy flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy him. He knew. He knew all along."

"I tend to sweat heavily in warm climates. My blood is too thick. My clothes are soaking wet from dawn to dusk. This worried me at first, but when I went to a doctor and described my normal daily intake of booze, drugs and poison he told me to come back when the sweating stopped."

"This is one of the hallmarks of Vegas hospitality The only bedrock rule is Don't Burn the Locals... if Charlie Manson checked into the Sahara tomorrow, nobody would hassle him as long as he tipped big."

"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!" "Killed?” He almost whispered the word. “In Vietnam!” I yelled. “On the goddamn television!" “Oh...yes...yes,” he said. “This terrible war. When will it end?" “Tell me,” I said quietly. “What do you want?"

"Even a goddamn were-wolf is entitled to legal counsel..."

"The news was on again. Nixon's face filled the screen, but his speech was hopelessly garbled. The only word I could make out was “sacrifice.” Over and over again: “Sacrifice...sacrifice…sacrifice." I could hear myself breathing heavily. My attorney seemed to notice. “Just stay relaxed,” he said over his shoulder, without looking at me. “Don't try to fight it or...you'll just wither up and die.” His hand snaked out to change channels."

"KNOW YOUR DOPE FIEND. YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT! You will not be able to see his eyes because of Tea-Shades, But his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can't find a rape victim. He will stagger and babble when questioned. He will not respect your badge. The Dope Fiend fears nothing. He will attack, for no reason, with every weapon at his command-including yours. BEWARE. Any officer apprehending a suspected marijuana addict should use all necessary force immediately. One stitch in time (on him) will usually save nine on you. Good luck. - The Chief"

"The Coupe de Ville is not your ideal machine for high speed cornering in residential neighborhoods…At first I thought it was only because the tires were soft, so I took it into the Texaco station next to the Flamingo and had the tires pumped up to fifty pounds [345 kPa] each — which alarmed the attendant, until I explained that these were "experimental" tires. But fifty pounds each didn't help the cornering, so I went back a few hours later and told him I wanted to try seventy-five. He shook his head nervously. "What's wrong?" I asked. "You think they can't take seventy-five?”…In truth, I was nervous. The two front ones were tighter than snare drums; they felt like teak wood when I tapped on them with the rod. But what the hell? I thought. If they explode, so what? It's not often that a man gets a chance to run terminal experiments on a virgin Cadillac."

"When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it heavy. Don't waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies."

"After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him..."

"All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create...a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel."

"There was evidence in this room, of excessive consumption of almost every type of drug known to civilized man since 1544 A.D. It could only be explained as a montage,"

"In a scene where nobody with any ambition is really what he appears to be, there’s not much risk in acting like a king-hell freak."

"I shrugged. "That's not me", I said. "That's a guy named Thompson". He works for Rolling Stone... a really vicious crazy kind of person."

"Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

"I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident."

"I feel like I’ve known Hunter S. Thompson for most of my life. I first encountered him in 1981, when I was twelve. A family friend had moved out after a long stay in the guest room, and I decided to find out what he’d left behind. On the nightstand I found a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I liked the cover art, so I read it. It changed my life. The book made me want to drop everything (specifically, the sixth grade) and take up journalism. It made me want to travel the world with a pen and notebook, having adventures, recording my observations, and speaking fearlessly on behalf of truth as a sworn guardian of the First Amendment. But mostly, it made me want to do drugs."

"The real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it."

"But the soul has no culture. The soul has no color, or accent, or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul cannot be stilled."

"Optimism is the first cousin of love and it is exactly like love in three ways: it's pushy, it has no real sense of humor, and it shows up where you least expect it."

"We are made out of stars, you and I."

""He would have made a good soldier." I raised my eyebrows in greater surprise. Modena wasn't just meek, it seemed to me then, he was a weak man. I couldn't imagine what Abdullah meant. I didn't know then that good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict."

"I'd lost my closest friends in the same week, and with them I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says You are here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and reasons for loving them."

"For what is love if not the promise to forgive? - Lin"

"Men wage war for profit or principle, but they fight them for land and women."

"We don’t really know what a pleasure it is to run in our own language until we are forced to stumble in someone else’s."

"There’s no animal in the world with a deeper sense of parody than a horse. A cat can make you look clumsy and a dog can make you look stupid, but only a horse can make you look both at the same time. And then, with nothing more than the flick of a tail or a casual stomp on your foot, it lets you know that it did in on purpose."

"There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me. Frankly, I am shocked at you. You must know this, surely? Some years ago I suffered such an offensively gratuitous piece of good advice that I was depressed for six months afterwards. It was a very close call - I almost never recovered."

"What characterizes the human race more,’ Karla once asked me, ‘cruelty or the capacity to feel shame for it?’ I thought the question was acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know that it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterizes the human races. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive."

"A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there is no river."

"Sometimes the lion must roar, just to remind the horse of his fear."

"Now, sadly, there is all attitude and no style. It is the mark of the age in which we live that the style becomes the attitude instead of the attitude becoming the style."

"The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business."

"“In matters of food I am French, in matters of love I am Italian, and in matters of business I am Swiss. Very Swiss. Strictly Neutral.” - Didier"

"Rule number one of street fighting - stand your ground and never walk backwards, unless you’re preparing a counter-strike. Rule number two - never put your head down. Rule number three - always get crazier than the other guy. Rule number four - always keep something in reserve. - Lin"

"Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry they are not alone, and causing pain is how they grieve."

"The only victory that really counts in prison is survival."

"In prison, a man rations his smiles because predatory men see smiling as a weakness, weak men see it as an invitation, and prison guards see it as a provocation to some new torment."