
“I found the tide of wine and wassail fast gaining on the dry land of sober judgment.”
Washington Irving
more infosource: Old Christmas and Bracebridge Hall: from the sketch-book of Washington Irving (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919), 71.
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category: alcohol, drunk, wine
medium: Nonfiction
“I like on the table,
when we’re speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.”
Pablo Neruda
more infosource: “Oda al Vino [Ode to Wine],” trans. Margaret Sayers Peden, in Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 167.
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category: alcohol, socializing, wine
medium: Poetry
via: Beverly Bader“I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”
John Steinbeck
more infosource: Travels with Charley: In Search of America (New York: Penguin, 1997), 17.
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category: alcohol, appetite, marriage, masculinity, passion
medium: Memoir
“I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis.”
Truman Capote
more infosource: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 28.
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category: alcohol, cigarette, coffee, creativity, habit, horizontal, routine, writing
medium: interview
notes: Originally published in Issue 16 of The Paris Review, 1957.
“People who habitually drink water become just as good gourmets about water as wine drinkers about wine. For fifty or sixty years of my life, I have drunk only water, and no lover of wine has ever felt the same delight in some Grand-Laffite or Chambertin as I have in a glass of cool spring water whose purity has not been tainted by any earthy salts.”
Alexandre Dumas
more infosource: Dumas on Food (London: Folio Society, 1979), 299.
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category: alcohol, drink, gourmet, salt, spring water, water, wine
medium: nonfiction
via: Kevin Lippert“I have half a notion to learn to make bread myself: I imagine it’s no harder than mixing a good Martini, and I might come to enjoy the work.”
E. B. White
more infosource: “Fro-Joy,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), 137.
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category: alcohol, bread, cooking, martini
medium: essay
notes: White wrote this essay in January 1940.
“…in New York at the end of the day I play ostrich. I take a glass of beer or wine or a pill and go to sleep to have energy for the next day.”
Anaïs Nin
more infosource: The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p53.
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category: alcohol, city living, coping mechanism, drug, escape, New York City, ostrich
medium: diary
notes: from a winter 1967–1968 entry in Nin's diary


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