“It was a woman who drove me to drink, and I never had the courtesy to thank her for it.”
“I have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.”
“Some men are like musical glasses; to produce their finest tones you must keep them wet.”
“The decline of the aperitif may well be one of the most depressing phenomena of our time.”
“I have fed purely upon ale; I have eat my ale, drank my ale, and I always sleep upon ale.”
“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
“O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil.”
“Fill it up. I take as large draughts of liquor as I did of love. I hate a flincher in either.”
“Even though a number of people have tried, no one has ever found a way to drink for a living.”
“Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why: drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.”
“When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn't know how to play them when I was drunk.”
“If merely ''feeling good'' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.”
“Alcohol is necessary for a man so that he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed be the facts.”
“And when night, darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.”
“Macduff: What three things does drink especially provoke? Porter: Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine.”
“There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink.”
“The first glass is for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the forth for my enemies.”
“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.”
“And must I wholly banish hence these red and golden juices, and pay my vows to Abstinence, that pallidest of Muses?”
“There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.”
“There are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits that are not good until they are rotten.”
“Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.”
“I'm tied of hearing about temperance instead of abstinence, in order to please the cocktail crowd in church congregations.”
“I'd hate to be a teetotaler. Imagine getting up in the morning and knowing that's as good as you're going to feel all day.”
“A sudden violent jolt of it has been known to stop the victim's watch, snap his suspenders and crack his glass eye right across.”
“I can't say whether we had more wit among us now than usual, but I am certain we had more laughing, which answered the end as well.”
“Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.”
“No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.”
“For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.”
“A few years back I was more a candidate for skid row bum than an Emmy. If I hadn't stopped [drinking], I'd be playing handball with John Belushi right now.”