The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1) QUOTES

21 " O. J. Simpson drew bigger crowds, but most of his admirers were around 12 years old. Two-thirds of them were black and many looked like fugitives from the Credit Bureau’s garnishee file. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

22 " Flying United, to me, is like crossing the Andes in a prison bus. There is no question in my mind that somebody like Pat Nixon personally approves every United stewardess. Nowhere in the Western world is there anything to equal the collection of self-righteous shrews who staff the “friendly skies of United.” I do everything possible to avoid that airline, often at considerable cost and personal inconvenience. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

23 " Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.” —J. Conrad "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

24 " McGovern is very sensitive about this sort of thing, and for excellent reason. In three of the last four big primaries (Ohio, Nebraska & California) he has spent an alarmingly big chunk of his campaign time denying that behind his calm and decent facade he is really a sort of Trojan Horse candidate—coming on in public as a bucolic Jeffersonian Democrat while secretly plotting to seize the reins of power and turn them over at midnight on Inauguration Day to a Red-bent hellbroth of radicals, Dopers, Traitors, Sex Fiends, Anarchists, Winos, and “extremists” of every description. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

25 " That’s where Time magazine lives … way out there on the puzzled, masturbating edge, peering through the keyhole and selling what they see to the big wide world of Chamber of Commerce voyeurs who support the public prints. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

26 " Betting against the point spread is a relatively mechanical trip, but betting against another individual can be very complex, if you’re serious about it—because you want to know, for starters, whether you’re betting against a fool or a wizard, or maybe against somebody who’s just playing the fool. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

27 " Well … yes, and here we go again. But before we get to The Work, as it were, I want to make sure I know how to cope with this elegant typewriter—(and, yes, it appears that I do) —so why not make this quick list of my life’s work and then get the hell out of town on the 11:05 to Denver? Indeed. Why not? But for just a moment I’d like to say, for the permanent record, that it is a very strange feeling to be a 40-year-old American writer in this century and sitting alone in this huge building on Fifth Avenue in New York at one o’clock in the morning on the night before Christmas Eve, 2000 miles from home, and compiling a table of contents for a book of my own Collected Works in an office with a tall glass door that leads out to a big terrace looking down on The Plaza Fountain. Very strange. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

28 " It has been a failure of such monumental proportions that political apathy is no longer considered fashnionable or even safe, among millions of people who only two years ago thought that anybody who disagreed openly with the goverment was either paranoid or subversive. Political candidates in 1974, at least, are going to have to deal with an angry, disillusioned electorate that is not likely to settle for flag-waving and pompous bullshit. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

29 " How long, oh Lord, how long? And how much longer will we have to wait before some high-powered shark with a fistful of answers will finally bring us face-to-face with the ugly question that is already so close to the surface in this country, that sooner or later even politicians will have to cope with it? "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

30 " So if I decide to leap for The Fountain when I finish this memo, I want to make one thing perfectly clear—I would genuinely love to make that leap, and if I don’t I will always consider it a mistake and a failed opportunity, one of the very few serious mistakes of my First Life that is now ending. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

31 " And what kind of sick and twisted impulse would cause a professional sportswriter to deliver a sermon from the Book of Revelations off his hotel balcony on the dawn of Super Sunday? I had not planned a sermon for that morning. I had not even planned to be in Houston, for that matter… . But now, looking back on that outburst, I see a certain inevitability about it. Probably it was a crazed and futile effort to somehow explain the extremely twisted nature of my relationship with God, Nixon and the National Football League: The three had long since become inseparable in my mind, a sort of unholy trinity that had caused me more trouble and personal anguish in the past few months than Ron Ziegler, Hubert Humphrey and Peter Sheridan all together had caused me in a year on the campaign trail. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

32 " I went back to one of the motels, went into the office, turned on the light, picked a key off the desk and located a cabin by myself. The next morning it took me 20 minutes to find somebody to pay—and then I was told I wouldn’t be welcome there in the future because my car had a license plate from Louisville. They don’t care much for city boys, specially when they’re roamin’ around late at night. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

33 " As I came over the brink of the cliff, a few children laughed, an old hag began screeching, and the men just stared. Here was a white man with 12 Yankee dollars in his pocket and more than $ 500 worth of camera gear slung over his shoulders, hauling a typewriter, grinning, sweating, no hope of speaking the language, no place to stay—and somehow they were going to have to deal with me. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

34 " Mother of babbling god!” I muttered. The word “deadline” caused my brain to seize up momentarily. Deadline? Yes. Tomorrow morning, about 15 more hours… . "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

35 " The Air Force has never valued a sense of humor in its career men, and in high-risk fields like flight testing, a sense of the absurd will cripple a man’s future just as surely as an LSD habit. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

36 " cordovan "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

37 " local reporters going out on the press-bus each day for the carefully staged “player interviews,” that Dolphin tackle Manny Fernandez described as “like going to the dentist every day to have the same tooth filled, "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

38 " … because what I want you to tell me, Mother Roberts—and I mean this very seriously—is why have I been in Houston for eight days without anybody offering me some cocaine? "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

39 " mad drinkers and men of strange arts. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)

40 " Before San Francisco he had been in Germany, teaching English and cultivating an oriental-type beard. On his way out to the coast he stopped in New York and picked up a mistress with a new Ford. It was de rigueur, in those days, to avoid marriage at all costs. He came to me through the recommendation of a friend then working in Europe for a British newspaper. “Willard is a great man,” said the letter. “He is an artist and a man of taste. "

― Hunter S. Thompson , The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers, #1)