America…just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable

Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something,...

Kill the body and the head will die.

Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.

How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the...

Justice is not cheap in this country, and people who insist on it are usually either desperate or possessed by some private determination bordering on monomania.

The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine,...

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole...

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60’s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without...

Just the other day the AP wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contest and won a two-week vacation–all expenses paid–wherever he wanted to go. Any place in...

Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

The reefer butt is called a ‘roach’ because it resembles a cockroach… cockroach… cockroach…

It is Autumn, as you know, and things are beginning to die. It is so wonderful to be out in the crisp Fall air, with the leaves turning gold and the grass turning brown and...

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride…and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well…maybe chalk it off to forced conscious...

Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.

In the Carolinas they say “hill people” are different from “flatlands people,” and as a native Kentuckian with more mountain than flatlands blood, I’m inclined to agree. This was one of the theories I’d been...

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.

No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No...

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell...

They claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

How many more nights and weird mornings can this terrible shit go on? How long can the body and the brain tolerate this doom-struck craziness? This grinding of teeth, this pouring of sweat, this pounding...

I have explained many times that I am, by Profession, a Gambler — not some jock-sniffing nerd or a hired human squawk-box with the brain of a one-cell animal. No. That would be your average...

When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his...

She laughed. ‘It won’t last. Nothing lasts. But I’m happy now.”Happy,’ I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most...

It was necessary, we felt, to thoroughly terrify our opponents, so that even in hollow victory, they would learn to fear every sunrise …

The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards,...

Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they’re attached to dollar signs – unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times.

When you’re asked to stay out of a bar you don’t just punch the owner–you come back with your army and tear the place down, destroy the whole edifice and everything it stands for. No...

On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.

McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression...

It had been a bad trip … fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way back to San Francisco, I tried...

These goddamn Jesus freaks! They’re multiplying like rats!

Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live...

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and a head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of...

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.

The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you’re told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other “official spokesmen” for the team-owners who provide the free booze...

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!

Everybody has the same chance but you need to be rich…

A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

They don’t hardly make ’em like him any more – but just to be on thesafe side, he should be castrated anyway.

In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.

I felt a little guilty about jangling the poor bugger’s brains with that evil fantasy. But what the hell? Anybody who wanders around the world saying, “Hell yes, I’m from Texas,” deserves whatever happens to...

Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who’d been given a choice between being shipped off to the New...

Faster, Faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but...

The only problem with the Angels’ new image was that the outlaws themselves didn’t understand it. It puzzled them to be treated as symbolic heroes by people with whom they had almost nothing in common....