Auszug

Hunter S. Thompson: Why write

The real difference between this latest binge and all the others of the past two years is that I seem to have lost what I think is the most important thing a writer can have: the ability to live with constant loneliness and a strong sense of revulsion for the banalities of everyday socializing. It just doesn’t seem very important anymore that I write. I can understand this, I think, in light of what I call “the psychology of imposition.” This theory holds that the most overriding of all human desires is the need to amount to something. I’m not talking about the old Horatio Alger gimmick, but the more basic desire to know that your life means something. As Faulkner says, writing is his way of saying “Kilroy was here,” of imposing himself, however briefly, on reality. If only for an instant, the image of the man is imposed on the chaotic mainstream of life and it remains there forever: order out of chaos, meaning out of meaninglessness. Just as some people turn to religion to find meaning, the writer turns to his craft and tries to impose meaning, or to sift the meaning out of chaos and put it in order.

Hunter S. Thompson, Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955–1967 (New York: Random House, 1998).