Freak Kingdom Quotes

“a leader who wouldn’t be corrupted by the enormous degree of power he sought, and who, as a result, suggested a future in which the collective hopes of the country might for once outweigh the ruthless, cheap, small-minded, glaringly hypocritical ambition that so many other candidates had relied upon for victory.”
― Timothy Denevi, Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism

“Like many another writer,” Thompson wrote, “Hemingway did his best work when he felt he was standing on something solid—like an Idaho mountainside, or a sense of conviction.” But what happens when the premise on which these convictions are based changes too rapidly and unpredictably? How do writers whose perspectives have been forged by their experiences within a certain time and place adjust to a new reality—to “the mean nature of a world that will not stand still long enough for them to see it clear as a whole?” In other words: how do you stay relevant when the moment in history you’re tasked with rendering is defined by a lack of clarity? “It is not just a writer’s crisis,” Thompson concluded, “but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task in a time when chaos is multiplying.”
― Timothy Denevi, Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism

“It didn’t seem to matter that he was married to a beautiful woman who loved him; that they’d had a child, a son; that by moving to Sonoma he was acting on a moral imperative, living a life he felt called to answer; or that, at last, he was supporting himself and his family as a writer.”
― Timothy Denevi, Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism

“Within me was an insistence that whatever we did, the things that were said, the dawns, the cities, the lives, all of it had to be drawn together, made into pages, or it was in danger of not existing, of never having been. There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.”
― Timothy Denevi, Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism