Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it. I drank more and continued my mantra. ‘Stop thinking’, swig, ’empty

A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman’s pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog.

I worried about it for a moment as I held the bottle by the neck, but I wanted to trust her, and so I did. I took a minor sip, and as soon as I swallowed, I felt my body rejecting the stinging syrup of it. It washed back up my esophagus, but I swallowed hard, and there, yes, I did it. I was drinking on campus.

No drugs. No drinking. No cigarettes.

Del: How’s your drink?
Neal: Good.
Del: Go for another one? Where you been? Have you been to Italy? Have you had amaretto?
Neal: I had amaretto and this is a gin.
Del: Gin.
Neal: Give me that – is there a tequila there?
Del: Ahem. A little Mexican trip.
Neal: Tequila?
Del: Here you go. Coming up.
Neal: Is this a good combo or what?
Del: No, probably not. Me, I’m goin’ back to, uh, Jamaica. Jamaica, mon. Go to Jamaica. Have some rum, mon. Dig it. Iree, iree, mon.

Kevin Copeland: [as Brittany Wilson] Sweetie! You’ve got to slow up with those cosmos!
Marcus Copeland: [as Tiffany Wilson] Tee-hee! Oh, fine.
Kevin Copeland: [as Brittany Wilson] Brittany and Tiffany Wilson, checking in!

“Hungover?”
“Like an alcoholic preacher on Sunday morning.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much,” I suggested.
“Pudge.” She shook her head and sipped the cold coffee and wine. “Pudge, what you must understand about me is that I am a deeply unhappy person.”

An Englishman will fairly drink as much as will maintain two families of Dutch.

Good ale, the true and proper drink of Englishmen. He is not deserving of the name of Englishman who speaketh against ale, that is good ale.

“What? You mean you’d dare drink right after getting out of jail for intoxication?”
“That’s when you need a drink the most.”

“We have to slow down or I’ll puke,” I remarked after we finished the first bottle.

“I’m sorry, Pudge. I wasn’t aware that someone was holding open your throat and pouring wine down it,” the Colonel responded.

We left.
We did not say: Don’t drive, You’re drunk.
We did not say: We aren’t letting you in that car when you are upset.
We did not say: We insist on going with you.
We did not say: This can wait until tomorrow. Anything – everything – can wait.

A long boozy dinner in the East Village with people you need to impress. After dinner, more drinks down the street. After those drinks, more drinks at your hotel’s rooftop bar. After that, hours on the sofa in your room staring at CNN, shaking, afraid to go to sleep because it will lead to waking up.

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn’t fit the other. I didn’t care.

Even the ocean of all alcohol can’t intoxicate me better than one kiss with you.

I wanted to like booze more than I actually did (which is more or less the precise opposite of how I felt about Alaska).

That night, the booze felt great, as the warmth of the wine in my stomach spread through my body. I didn’t like feeling stupid or out of control, but I liked the way it made everything (laughing, crying, peeing in front of your friends) easier.

You are a nerd, Pudge. But you’re not gonna let a detail like that keep you from drinking.

Alaska displayed two of those warning signs. She had lost, although not recently, her mother. And her drinking, always pretty steady, had definitely increased in the last month of her life.

I have a fake ID, but it sucks. So every time I go to the liquor store, I try to buy ten bottles of this, and some vodka for the Colonel. And so when it finally works, I’m covered for a semester. And then I give the Colonel his vodka, and he puts it wherever he puts it, and I take mine and bury it.

This isn’t milk. It’s five parts milk and one part vodka. I call it ambrosia. Drink of the gods. You can barely smell the vodka in the milk, so the Eagle can’t catch me unless he actually takes a sip. The downside is that it tastes like sour milk and rubbing alcohol.

“Here’s to new beginnings,” Stuart says and raises his bourbon.
I nod, sort of wanting to tell him that all beginnings are new.

The phrase booze and mischief left me worrying I’d stumbled into what my mother referred to as “the wrong crowd,” but for the wrong crowd, they both seemed awfully smart.

When I got back to Los Angeles I found a cheap hotel just off Hoover Street and stayed in bed and drank. I drank for some time, three or four days. I couldn’t get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.

I got into bed, opened the bottle, worked the pillow into a hard knot behind my back, took a deep breath, and sat in the dark looking out of the window. It was the first time I had been alone for five days. I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me. I took a drink of wine.

My idea about the whole thing was that most people weren’t alcoholics, they only thought that they were. It was something that couldn’t be rushed. It took at least twenty years to become a bonafide alcoholic. I was on my 45th year and didn’t regret any of it.

Champagne makes you feel like it’s Sunday and better days are just around the corner.

I never had a drink in my life. I don’t smoke or anything.

I need you to score me some juice.

Whiskey may not cure your insomnia, but it makes you more content to stay awake.

I’d tasted her boozy breath. And then something invisible snapped inside her and that which had come together commenced to fall apart. And maybe that was the only answer we’d ever have. She fell apart because that’s what happens.

Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher’s last words were “Now comes the mystery.” The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe that’s a record,” before dying. Alaska’s favorite was playwright Eugene O’Neill: “Born in a hotel room, and — God damn it — died in a hotel room.” Even car-accident victims sometimes have time for last words. Princess Diana said, “Oh God. What’s happened?” Movie star James Dean said, “They’ve got to see us,” just before slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.

Sherry… a silly, sickly compound, the use of which will transform a nation, however bold and warlike by nature, into a race of sketchers, scribblers, and punsters, in fact into what Englishmen are at the present day.

It’s better to have a hangover of off-roading than liquor.

This is me every night dude, just staring at buttholes and getting a buzz on.

There’s gonna be an ass-ton of crabs, lobsters, wine, Bartles & Jaymes, corn on the cob, f**kin’ booger sugar.