Home > Author > William McKeen
1 " Creating art allows us to beat the odds and find immortality, without having to do the whole Doctor Faustus thing. Though Brian Wilson and Mike Love no longer collaborate and Carl and Dennis Wilson are gone, they are all still together on the radio late at night, where they join voices and are young and golden and beautiful forever. "
― William McKeen , Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles
2 " This is where the disillusioned gathered to look for new illusions "
― William McKeen , Mile Marker Zero
3 " Samuel Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. "
― William McKeen , Outlaw Journalist
4 " In Washington, truth is never told in daylight hours or across a desk, "
5 " Running had become the new sport of the ritualistic liberal. "
6 " It was just Dylan, with a murmuring electric guitar, and the louder Hunter played the song, the larger were the spaces in the music, allowing him to crawl inside. "
7 " I am a bigot. I’m what they called a ‘multibigot.’ . . . A unibigot is a racist. A multibigot is just a prick. "
8 " He breakfasted on bloody marys and beer and drank Wild Turkey and Chivas by the tumbler, but he was rarely shit-faced. "
9 " I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language,” Hunter wrote. “I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music. "
10 " I secretly worship God,” Hunter wrote near the end of his life. “He had the good judgment to leave me alone to write a few genuine black-on-white pages by myself. "
11 " Hunter Thompson wrote suicide notes all his life. "
12 " This is our country, too, and we can goddam well control it ifwe learn to use the tools.—HST, 1969 "
13 " There was this guy lying on the couch,” Laila recalled. “I had no idea who he was. I just remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh.’ I had this feeling as if a bomb had dropped. I kind of knew from the second I saw him that I would either love him or hate him. "
14 " Capitol printed 466,000 copies of the Smile album jacket "
15 " I’ve gone to the bottom of the well,” Hunter said, “and the animal’s not down there. "
16 " David Felton, his former editor at Rolling Stone, called it “probably the worst-edited and most self-indulgent work since the Bible. There doesn’t seem to be any order. "
17 " Stranahan kept his home in Aspen and accumulated more property. Also a fine-arts photographer, human-rights activist, philanthropist, beer brewer (the Flying Dog brands), and frustrated delinquent, he was drawn to Hunter and arranged the lease for the three-level house, a smaller cabin nearby, and a stable, and the acreage resting on top of a bluff. "
18 " Buy the ticket, take the ride, "
19 " He still lived as if he were twenty-two. "
20 " Chicago—this vicious, stinking zoo, this mean-grinning, Mace-smelling boneyard of a city; an elegant rockpile monument to everything cruel and stupid and corrupt in the human spirit. "
