Sloshed and Scribbling: Getting Drunk With Your Favorite Authors

Substance abuse—alcoholism, in particular—lurks within the biographies of many great writers. In some cases, it's impossible to talk about the author without speaking about the booze (Bukowski, Lowry). Many readers (and aspiring writers) like to romanticise the role of drinking in the creative process, thinking it a necessity for the creation of art. In the spirit of complicating the conversation, here are photos of famous authors drinking, with a quote from each about hitting the sauce. See how enticed you become.

Follow @ComplexGuide

"I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was a Château Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company."

Jake Barnes, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

"Next to music beer was best."

Mick Kelly, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

"'But can't you see cabrón that she is thinking that the first thing you think of after she has arrived home like this is a drink even if it is only a drink of strychnine that intrusive necessity for which and juxtaposition cancels its innocence so you see you might as well in the face of such hostility might you not start now on the whiskey instead of later no on the tequila where it is by the wall all right all right we know where it is that would be the beginning of the end nor on the mescal which would be the end though a damned good end perhaps but whiskey the fine old healthful throat-smarting fire of your wife's ancestors nació 1820 y siguiendo tan campante and afterwards you might perhaps have some good beer for you too and full of vitamins for your brother will be here and it is an occasion and this is perhaps the whole point for celebration of course it is and while drinking the whiskey and later the beer you could nevertheless still be tapering off poco a poco as you must be everyone knows it's dangerous to attempt it too quickly still keeping up Hugh's good work of straightening you out of course you would!'"

Geoffrey Firmin, Under the Volcano (1947)

"'I remember once I drank forty-nine Guinnesses straight off and I came home on top of a bus. There's nothing morbid about a man who can do that. Right on top of the bus, too, not just in the upper deck.'"

Donald Allingham, Adventures in the Skin Trade (1953)

"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."

Jim Dixon, Lucky Jim (1954)

BIG DADDY
A whiskey highball would injure this spastic condition?

BRICK
No, sir, it might do it good.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof(1955)

"In 1942 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Cafe on Scollay Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and assorted civilians came in and cast their sentient debouchements on me till I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all?—anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind."

Sal Paradise, On the Road(1957)

"[Holly Golightly] reached for my martini, I hadn't touched it; she drained it in two swallows, and took my hand. 'Quit stalling.'"

The Narrator, Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958)

"[Ralph] Steadman wanted to see some Kentucky Colonels, but he wasn't sure what they looked like. I told him to go back to the clubhouse men's rooms and look for men in white linen suits vomiting in the urinals. 'They'll usually have large brown whiskey stains on the fronts of their suits,' I said. 'But watch the shoes, that's the tip-off. Most of them manage to avoid vomiting on their own clothes, but they never miss their shoes.'"

"The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," Scanlan's Monthly (June 1970)

"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.”

Henry Chinaski, Women (1978)

"J&B I am thinking. Glass of J&B in my right hand I am thinking. Hand I am thinking. Charivari. Shirt from Charivari. Fusilli I am thinking. Jami Gertz I am thinking. I would like to fuck Jami Gertz I am thinking. Porsche 911. A sharpei I am thinking. I would like to own a sharpei. I am twenty-six years old I am thinking. I will be twenty-seven next year. A Valium. I would like a Valium. No, two Valium I am thinking. Cellular phone I am thinking."

Patrick Bateman, American Psycho (1991)

"What the soothing people at Alco­hol­ics Anonymous don’t or won’t understand is that suicide or self-destruction would probably have come much earlier to some people if they could not have had a drink. We are born into a losing struggle, and nobody can hope to come out a winner, and much of the intervening time is crushingly tedious in any case. Those who see this keenly, or who register the blues intently, are not to be simplistically written off as 'dysfunctional' cynics or lushes. Winston Chur­chill put it very squarely when he defined the issue as, essentially, a wager. He was a lifelong suf­ferer from the depression that he nicknamed his 'black dog,' but he could rouse himself to action and commitment and inspiration, and the brandy bottle was often a crucial prop. I have taken more out of alcohol, he said simply, than it has taken out of me. His chief antagonist, Adolf Hitler, was, I need hardly add, a fanatical teetotaler (though with a shorter and less wholesome life span)."

"Living Proof," Vanity Fair (March 2003)