Hey, I’ve started compiling some good Hunter quotes, and as I am reading one of his books of letters right now, I am sure I’ll have more coming. If you’ve got any good ones, feel free to add them. Also, here’s a funny article by Tom Wolfe about the times he spent with Hunter. And here’s a short but wonderful eulogy by his famous artist friend Ralph Steadman. Finally, check out my eulogy to the good doctor on the message board. Click below to see the quotes.
-What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation.
-I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like f******, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling.
-I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.
-I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
-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.
-The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.
-With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.
-This blizzard of mind-warping war propaganda out of Washington is building up steam. Monday is Anthrax, Tuesday is Bankruptcy, Friday is Child-Rape, Thursday is Bomb-scares, etc., etc., etc…. If we believed all the brutal, frat-boy threats coming out of the White House, we would be dead before Sunday. It is pure and savage terrorism reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
-Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these Abu Ghraib photographs did.
-We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world – bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts.
-Register at a hotel under a pseudonym, and then rent two convertibles – a Porsche and a green Cadillac – so you can switch cars when things start to go bad. Be sure to launch one of these cars off a steep hill.
-Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas … with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.
-(Nixon) was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn’t imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn’t quite reach the lever on the voting machine.
-If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.