"We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail."
— David Sedaris (Naked)

"Lady Astor to Winston Churchill—
"Sir, if you were my husband, I would poison your drink."

His reply—
"Madam, if you were my wife, I would drink it."
— Winston S. Churchill

"That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen."
— Charles Bukowski (Women: A Novel)

"There are two kinds of people I don't trust: people who don't drink and people who collect stickers."
— Chelsea Handler (My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands)

"I'm not drunk, just a little stoned."
— Gerard Way

"Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common."
— David Sedaris (Naked)

"Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy."
— Frank Sinatra

"Drinking is fun! It makes me feel horrible and sexy!"
— Warren Ellis

"One more drink and I'll be under the host."
— Mae West

"For the first twenty years of my life, I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually, I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it’s funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even made it to the bed. I’d squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I’m now told that this is not called “going to sleep” but rather “passing out,” a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment."
— David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)

""I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.""
— Tom Waits

"it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance"
— William Shakespeare (Macbeth)

"Here’s to alcohol, the cause of — and solution to — all life’s problems. "
— Matt Groening

"Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness."
— Oscar Wilde

"I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight...I agree."
— Koren Zailckas (Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood)

"When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument."
— C.S. Forester (African Queen)

"The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at n outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her skirt and see the dark traces of spilled vodka or whiskey. The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: "booze affects material as it does people.""
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages."
— Louis Pasteur

"Fill with mingled cream and amber,
I will drain that glass again.
Such hilarious visions clamber
Through the chamber of my brain —
Quaintest thoughts — queerest fancies
Come to life and fade away;
What care I how time advances?
I am drinking ale today."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"I automatically assume people won't like me, so I don't talk to them unless they approach me first. I can't become a part of a crowd because I can't get past that feeling that I don't belong."
— Stephanie Kuehnert (Ballads of Suburbia)

"...alcohol is only a mediocre, impotent tranquilizer compared to the terminal agony of being human. It is the shame of who we are that gives us the strength to pull ourselves up, but it also holds the temptation to put an end to it all."
— Do Phuoc Tien

"Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze."
— Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian)

"There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief."
— Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter)

"I am not your victim because you are not a predator any more than a bottle of scotch stalks an alcoholic."
— Sue William Silverman (Love Sick: One Woman's Journey through Sexual Addiction)

"Yes, madam, I am drunk. But in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly."
— Winston Churchill

"The one conclusion I have reached is that whiskey is a great leveler. You might be a hotshot advertising executive or a lowly foundry worker, but if you cannot hold your drink, you are just a drunkard."
— Vikas Swarup (Q & A)

"It was like a Russian party, Arkady thought. People got drunk, recklessly confessed their love, spilled their festering dislike, had hysterics, marched out, were dragged back in and revived with brandy. It wasn't a French salon."
— Martin Cruz Smith

"Maybe some folks are alcoholics and others are just voluntary drunks. Maybe some folks drink due to body chemistry and others due to their lazy characters. Maybe some have drinking problems, while others have problems enough to drink."
— George Jones (I Lived to Tell It All)

"Think champagne, drink champagne!"
— Ellen Dean

"When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all -- cash, booze, and a wife -- he couldn't be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground."
— Denis Johnson

"It began to falter not when the book publishers who loved books gave way to those who preferred profits to reading. It happened when publishers and editors cut back on their drinking. If there is one national flower in book publishing, it is the martini."
— Al Silverman

"It's a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."
— Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim and The Rachel Papers)

"At first I assumed he was a Mexican, but slowly began to realise that a real Mexican probably wouldn't be wearing a sombrero in a London nightclub. And he'd probably have a real moustache, not a stick-on one. A Mexican with a stick-on moustache would be like a Super-Mexican, because he'd have two moustaches, and that'd be cool, because a Super-Mexican could probably use his poncho as a cape, and then I realised I was saying all this to the man's face."
— Danny Wallace (Yes Man)

"Scotch whisky is made from barley and the morning dew on angel's nipples."
— Warren Ellis

""Love is alcohol."
-Summer Smith"
— Katherine Applegate

"[I]t is the wine that leads me on,
the wild wine
that sets the wisest man to sing
at the top of his lungs,
laugh like a fool – it drives the
man to dancing... it even
tempts him to blurt out stories
better never told."
— Homer (The Odyssey)

"Jaenelle’s eyes widened. “You let her drink a ‘gravedigger’?”

“No no no,” Wilhelmina said, shaking her head. “You shouldn’t ever drink a gravedigger until he’s had a bath.” She smiled placidly when Jaenelle and Lucivar just stared at her.

“Mother Night,” Lucivar muttered.

“Do you know that song?” Wilhelmina asked Jaenelle."
— Anne Bishop (Queen of the Darkness)

""It may be a long road with alcohol, but it will kill you in the end""
— The Cleaner

"Zeige dich nicht tapfer beim Wein, denn viele hat er schon zugrunde gerichtet."
— Ben Sira

"Я успел выпить еще темного, со вкусом сеновала, пива, и теперь с удовольствием бы обнял по-дружески звезду рок-н-ролла – всякое быдло склонно как можно скорее наверстать разницу между собой и объектом восхищения, будь то сладкая женщина или сердечно почитаемый человек."
— Zakhar Prilepin

"I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar -- that's wonderful."
— Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)

"Ignorance is a lot like alcohol: the more you have of it, the less you are able to see its effect on you."
— Jay M. Bylsma

"Here (Poland), we have more winter than summer, more ice than sunshine; and Vodka is nothing but melted ice. Every nation drinks in this way: the Italians and the French drink the gold of melted sunshine, we the ice. That’s why a Pole glides through life as if on skates, and that is why he often staggers, for he finds it slippery. The Pole’s sorrow is so hot that he finds in necessary to cool it with vodka, the sorrow of other nations, the sorrow of other nations is so cold so they have to fuel it with wine"
— Karol Makuszynski

"I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"If you were to ask me if I'd ever had the bad luck to miss my daily cocktail, I'd have to say that I doubt it; where certain things are concerned, I plan ahead."
— Luis Bunuel