Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

I didn't love school because I wanted to disguise that I was poorer than everybody else. So when I was a teen I reached out in a wrong way. I started to be a mugger, to rob people in the streets, just to supply for my needs.

As a newspaper reporter, I covered and was around a fair number of crime scenes involving juvenile delinquents, and few things bothered me more than listening to their parents. Crying, ranting, proclaiming how great their children were despite being kicked out of school or previous run-ins with the law.

In the early nineties, I was a cub reporter on a city newspaper in Limerick, and assigned to the courthouse there. One day, an old detective sergeant came and whispered to me in the press pit. He pointed out a young offender, a teenager who was up for stealing a car or something relatively minor, and said, 'See this kid? He'll kill.'

I go to correctional facilities and talk to kids there. They have little kids in there who are, like, 12 years old, stealing cars and stuff like that.

I was very unsure about what I wanted to do in high school.

This may surprise you, but I was arrested in high school.

When I finished high school, it was clear to me that I would study mathematics, even if I also considered economics and psychology.

It stands to reason that unloved and unwanted children are going to get into crime.

I've always been a creative speller and never achieved good grades in school. I graduated from high school but didn't have the opportunity to attend college, so I did what young women my age did at the time - I married.

Kids are wandering around the streets today that will become tomorrow's criminals that were yesterday's heroes.

I got caught stealing when I was a kid from the local bodega right across the street from where we lived. I tried to steal a big bag of Red Hot Dollars. And I swear, I was about 7 years old and the bag was bigger'n me.

I went to Locke High School in Watts towards the end of the super gangbanging era.

I wasn't stealing cars at like, six. But I've always been bad.

When I was 14 I wasn't even thinking of playing professional tennis. I was thinking of going to high school in Sweden then getting a job.

In all honesty, based on the direction my life was heading in before I got a real break in the music sh*t, I'm not gonna say I would be one hundred percent in a negative direction, but I know that I would still be in the streets, so if it wasn't for the music bein' my outlet, I'd probably be hustlin', I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to go and get a nine-to-five, I never finished high school or none of that.

I tried to talk to the graduates who haven't figured what they're going to do next. The kids who are heading in medical school or law school, they've got pretty much figured where they're headed in life. But there are so many kids out there, that are just going, they're still kids. They've always been promoted from grade to grade.

And although I broke a lot of laws as a teenager, I straightened out immediately upon turning eighteen, when I realized the state had a legal right to execute me.

I never had a real job. I started acting in high school, and then I started working. So, I never got to have that experience.

I've always loved films, and I always felt like a storyteller. I left Norway after high school and moved to Manhattan and went to film school in Manhattan. That's when I really found out that this was my calling and what I wanted to do.

Before rap came along, I was, actually, actively in the streets; getting in trouble, doing the wrong thing.

The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.

Eighty-two percent of prisoners in the United States are high-school dropouts. A high-school dropout between the ages of 30 and 34 is two-thirds more likely to be in jail, or to have been in jail, or to be dead.

I am so sick of you smart kids. Why can't you just boost cars or steal stuff like normal kids?' 'We do steal stuff. Just bigger stuff.

I've been a writer longer than I've been an actor. I wrote short stories like crazy when I was in high school and college. I worked in advertising before I moved to L.A. to pursue acting.

I went - I had designed - in high school designed hundreds and hundreds of computers over and over and over, so I developed these skills without ever thinking I'd do it in life as job.