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....

Every time I think of Tim Leary I get angry. He was a liar and a quack and a worse human being than Richard Nixon. For the last twenty-six years of his life he worked...

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

I am a confused Musician who got sidetracked into this goddamn Word business for so long that I never got back to music – except maybe when I find myself oddly alone in a quiet...

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

The waitress had the appearance of a very old hooker who had finally found her place in life

He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction...

It never got weird enough for me.

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

Stop Duane Thomas!

Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

Good people drink good beer.

I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you...

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...

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...

A word to the wise is infuriating.

It is difficult for the ordinary voter to come to grips with the notion that a truly evil man, a truthless monster with the brains of a king rat and the soul of a cockroach,...

There’s a lot of things wrong with this country, but one of the few things still right with it is that a man can steer clear of the organized bullshit if he really wants to....

But I knew it was pure masturbation, because down in my gut I wanted nothing more than a clean bed and a bright room and something solid to call my own at least until I...

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a...

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people, anyway. For years I’ve regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the...

This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the...

Sala called for more drink and Sweep brought four rums, saying they were on the house. We thanked him and sat for another half hour, saying nothing. Down on the waterfront I could hear the...