The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson

"It never got weird enough for me." — HST

(I lay no claim to these photos, illustrations, videos, or texts. If you are the owner of any of the aforementioned, please let me know and I will take them down or add a credit. Credits have been added when available.)

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May 24, 2012 12:45 pm
"I’ve said before, The Great Gatsby is possibly the Great American Novel, if you look at it as a technical achievement. It’s about 55,000 words, which was astounding to me. In Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, I tried to compete with that. It was one of the basic guiding principles for my writing. I’ve always competed with that. Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life. Shoot, I couldn’t match 55,000 no matter how I chopped. There are few things that I read and say, ‘Boy, I wish I could write that.’ Damn few. The Book of Revelation is one. Gatsby is one."

—

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson - The Rolling Stone Interviews (via jujumigu)
May 17, 2012 6:15 pm
You got to explode eventually, my friend.

You got to explode eventually, my friend.

(Source: psychicshrapnel)

April 29, 2012 12:43 pm
"Whatever you’re doing, even if it’s crazy, if you get paid for it, well that can’t be insane. There’s insane that’s functional, and there’s insane that’s dysfunctional."

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Hunter S. Thompson, Ancient Gonzo Wisdom (via brideoffrankenstien)
April 24, 2012 6:15 pm
"But what I did assume at that time, early on and, shit— every year forever after that, was that I would be dead very soon. The fact that I’m not dead is sort of puzzling to me. It’s sort of an awkward thing to deal with… It’s like going into the 27th inning in a baseball game. You’re like, what the fuck am I doing here, man? "

—

Hunter S. Thompson, interviewed by Matthew Hahn for The Atlantic (via kelseydavis)

(Source: The Atlantic, via kelseydavis)

April 22, 2012 6:14 pm
"Right now I think it’s in my interest, and ours perhaps and maybe in the interest of the greater good, for me to smoke a joint and calm down."

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Hunter S. Thompson (via quotablestoner)

(Source: )

April 5, 2012 12:43 pm
"At age 22 I set what I insist is an all-time record for distance hitchhiking in Bermuda shorts: 3,700 miles in three weeks."

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1963 in an interview with The National Observer.
March 24, 2012 12:45 pm

akickevenfunnier:

Hunter S Thompson interviews Keith Richards

Always a favorite.

March 22, 2012 12:45 pm

Johnny Depp Talks Rum Diary And Hunter S. Thompson’s Rage

Johnny Depp made a special appearance at Columbia University last night to promote his latest movie, The Rum Diary, an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s early novel about a young journalist ensnared in a web of capitalist exploitation in Puerto Rico in the 1950s. Depp, director Alex Gibney (who made a documentary about Thompson called Gonzo), and Rum Diary director Bruce Robinson participated in a panel discussion prior to a screening of the film (which opens Friday). Thompson’s childhood friend and former editor of Rolling Stone Porter Bibb was also on hand, and recalled that Thompson was so worried about the book being tampered with that he wrote “contaminated with semen” on each galley copy.

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(via trinnaleong)

March 17, 2012 6:16 pm
"Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you’re writing about before you alter it."

—

Hunter S. Thompson, AP Interview (2003)
January 22, 2012 3:30 pm
HUNTER S. THOMPSON on Ralph Steadman ED: How does he behave in public when you’ve been with him? HST: He’s deceptively mild in public, although every once in a while he’ll run amok. He behaved pretty well at the Derby, even though he was drunk the whole time. ED: Drunk HST: He’s constantly drunk, in public — (America by Ralph Steadman, San Francisco Straight Arrow Press, 1974)(via fake-money)

HUNTER S. THOMPSON on Ralph Steadman

ED: How does he behave in public when you’ve been with him?

HST: He’s deceptively mild in public, although every once in a while he’ll run amok. He behaved pretty well at the Derby, even though he was drunk the whole time.

ED: Drunk

HST: He’s constantly drunk, in public —

(America by Ralph Steadman, San Francisco Straight Arrow Press, 1974)
(via fake-money)

January 13, 2012 3:32 pm
"It hasn’t helped a lot to be a savage comic-book character for the last fifteen years— a drunken screwball who should’ve been castrated a long time ago. The smart people in the media knew it was a weird exaggeration. The dumb ones took it seriously and warned their children to stay away from me at all costs. The really smart ones understood it was only a censored, kind of toned-down, children’s-book version of the real thing."

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Hunter S. Thompson, interview with William McKeen (via runaramble)

(Source: p-u-f-f-the-dragon)

January 2, 2012 6:33 pm

Hunter S. Thompson, The Art of Journalism No. 1

In an October 1957 letter to a friend who had recommended he read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “Although I don’t feel that it’s at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it one way or another, and I think that I’ll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden outbursts of frustrated violence… .”

Thompson carved out his niche early. He was born in 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky, where his fiction and poetry earned him induction into the local Athenaeum Literary Association while he was still in high school. Thompson continued his literary pursuits in the United States Air Force, writing a weekly sports column for the base newspaper. After two years of service, Thompson endured a series of newspaper jobs—all of which ended badly—before he took to freelancing from Puerto Rico and South America for a variety of publications. The vocation quickly developed into a compulsion.

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(via taotechill)

(Source: theparisreview.org)

December 28, 2011 3:41 pm

traderrock:

Hunter S. Thompson at UC Auditorium, Boulder, Colorado (11-1-77).

Hunter raps with the kids about the American Dream, Nixon, the Trilateral Commission, Vietnam, avoiding jail, and a whole lot more. Enjoy.

December 9, 2011 12:45 pm
"I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright… Or maybe “stupid” is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don’t bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I… And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there’s a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots."

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Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone Magazine, 1976 (via rafferson)
December 6, 2011 4:40 pm

Did you know Hunter S. Thompson and Allen Ginsberg had the same pot dealer in San Francisco in the 60’s?

Interviewer: I heard that you and Allen Ginsberg had the same weed dealer in the 60s.

H.S.T: That’s an obscure and arcane story, isn’t it? But yeah, yeah. I had met him before in New York during his poetry readings and things. In San Francisco, it turned out that we did have the same weed dealer. That’s when you bought weed in tins, tabacco tins. Ten dollars, fifteen. I lived in an apartment right next door to the guy he was buying it from. I was working on the Hells Angels book. I got to talk to him about it, and he was a big help. Allen was a good one.

Full interview here. (via strangetalesfromastrangetime)