The first time I managed to pick up a basketball I knew I was destined to lead the UK to another National championship. ... Even now, so many years later, I still believe Kentucky will go undefeated in March and win everything.
The massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.
I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.
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 not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts.
We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.
So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.
I am not a yachting person, by nature, but I have just enough experience on the sea under sail to feel a certain nostalgia for it when I see a big white racing yacht heeled over at cruising speed on the ocean, and I can still tie a mean bowline knot on just about anything in less than 10 seconds.
I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don't mind admitting any of them.
I've already become a mastodon in print -- I don't see a consciousness for my kind of journalism.
The writer must be a participant in the scene... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.
There are many harsh lessons to be learned from the gambling experience, but the harshest one of all is the difference between having Fun and being Smart.
All gamblers lose regularly, but they rarely discuss it in public. Losing is bad for the image, dude. Nobody buys Hot Tips from Losers. Remember that.
Nixon was a crook, of course, but he was also a rabid football fan -- and he knew the game, which still astounds me, but I have always had a soft spot for him because of it.
I don't think that my kind of journalism has ever been universally popular. It's lonely out here.
Remember this, folks -- I am a Hillbilly, and I don't always Bet the same way I talk. Good advice is one thing, but smart gambling is quite another.
Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.
All the blood is drained out of democracy -- it dies -- when only half the population votes.
Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer... in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.
Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.
You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.
I have never believed much in luck, and my sense of humor has tended to walk on the dark side.
Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.
It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.
Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it.
Richard Nixon was a criminally insane Monster -- Bill Clinton is a black-hearted Swine of a friend.
The only thing wrong with the NBA -- or any other professional sport, for that matter -- is a wild epidemic of Dumbness and overweening Greed. There is no Mystery about it, and no need to change any rules.
I have learned, in my life and work as a sportswriter, that big-time Sports and big-time Politics are not so far apart in America. They are both a means to the same end, which is victory... And why not? Victory is good for you, and don't let anybody tell you different.
I have warned many times about the guaranteed dangers of betting with your heart instead of your head -- big darkness, soon come -- but every once in a while you get a fair chance to have it both ways, and the annual NCAA basketball Tournament is one of them.
I am more than just a serious basketball fan. I am a life-long addict. I was addicted from birth, in fact, because I was born in Kentucky and I learned, early on, that Habitual Domination was a natural way of life.
The Raiders of old were vicious and crazy and cruel. Hanging around their locker room was like hanging around the weight room at Folsom Prison.
Nixon represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.
The trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to have around, especially as President.
I can't think in terms of journalism without thinking in terms of political ends. Unless there's been a reaction, there's been no journalism. It's cause and effect.
I am a generous man, by nature, and far more trusting than I should be. Indeed. The real world is risky territory for people with generosity of spirit. Beware.
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.
The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.
If Sunday is the Lord's day, then Saturday belongs to the Devil. It is the only night of the week when he gives out Free passes to the Late show at the Too Much Fun Club.
By disgracing and degrading the presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.
I wasn't trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn't have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.
Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn't anticipate.
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.
The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot -- and it's only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.
No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.
America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people -- including me -- would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment.
Rude people will now and then ask me why I think I know so much about Politics. I tell them it's because I'm Smart... But that is a lie: The real reason is because I'm an incurable Gambling addict.
Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common.
By any accepted standard, I have had more than nine lives. I counted them up once, and there were 13 times I almost and maybe should have died.
The next MVP of the Super Bowl is just as likely to have been a full-time grocery store bagger last year as a Heisman Trophy winner.
I hate pain, despite my ability to tolerate it beyond all known parameters, which is not necessarily a good thing.
