Updated 2 years ago
July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005 – Writer of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and many others
Wikipedia
Quotes:
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.
I was not proud of what I had learned, but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.
In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
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 the ones who have gone over.
A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!
History is hard to know because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time–and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened…
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…
And that, I think was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting–on our side or theirs. We all had the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
Yet what Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped to create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody – or at least some force–is tending that light at the end of the tunnel.
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
