Hunter S. Thompson Journalism Quotations

Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.

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.

Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer... in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

I've already become a mastodon in print - I don't see a consciousness for my kind of journalism.

Gonzo journalism is a style of ''reporting'' based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism -- and the best journalists have always known this. True gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it -- or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.

Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach.

If you work in either journalism or politics... you will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways-but it doesn't hurt as much when you're right.

Journalism is "a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.

Journalism, to me, is just another drug - a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight.

If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too many objective journalists on that list.