Outlaw Journalist Quotes

“Samuel Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“He still lived as if he were twenty-two.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“I secretly worship God,” Hunter wrote near the end of his life. “He had the good judgment to leave me alone to write a few genuine black-on-white pages by myself.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language,” Hunter wrote. “I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“I am a bigot. I’m what they called a ‘multibigot.’ . . . A unibigot is a racist. A multibigot is just a prick.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“Running had become the new sport of the ritualistic liberal.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“David Felton, his former editor at Rolling Stone, called it “probably the worst-edited and most self-indulgent work since the Bible. There doesn’t seem to be any order.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“There was this guy lying on the couch,” Laila recalled. “I had no idea who he was. I just remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh.’ I had this feeling as if a bomb had dropped. I kind of knew from the second I saw him that I would either love him or hate him.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“Does it look like [drugs have] fucked me up? I’m sitting here
on a beautiful beach in Mexico; I’ve written three books.
I’ve got a fine one-hundred acre fortress in Colorado.On that
evidence, I’d have to advise the use of drugs.
—HST to Craig Vetter, 1974”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“He was able to persuade the accounting department to pay for the cocaine Hunter had purchased to get members of the Oakland Raiders to open up during interviews.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“He breakfasted on bloody marys and beer and drank Wild Turkey and Chivas by the tumbler, but he was rarely shit-faced.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“In Washington, truth is never told in daylight hours or across a desk,”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“Buy the ticket, take the ride,”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“This is our country, too, and we can goddam well control it if
we learn to use the tools.
—HST, 1969”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“Chicago—this vicious, stinking zoo, this mean-grinning, Mace-smelling boneyard of a city; an elegant rockpile monument to everything cruel and stupid and corrupt in the human spirit.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“Stranahan kept his home in Aspen and accumulated more property. Also a fine-arts photographer, human-rights activist, philanthropist, beer brewer (the Flying Dog brands), and frustrated delinquent, he was drawn to Hunter and arranged the lease for the three-level house, a smaller cabin nearby, and a stable, and the acreage resting on top of a bluff.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“It was just Dylan, with a murmuring electric guitar, and the louder Hunter played the song, the larger were the spaces in the music, allowing him to crawl inside.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“I’ve gone to the bottom of the well,” Hunter said, “and the animal’s not down there.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

“Hunter Thompson wrote suicide notes all his life.”
― William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson