#10 - RAYMOND CHANDLER [1888-1959]

“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.”

#9 - FREDERICK EXLEY [1929-92]

“After a month’s sobriety my faculties became unbearably acute and I found myself unhealthily clairvoyant, having insights into places I’d as soon not journey to. Unlike some men, I had never drunk for boldness or charm or wit; I had used alcohol for precisely what it was, a depressant to check the mental exhilaration produced by extended sobriety.”

#8 - JACK KEROUAC [1922-69]

“As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.”

#7 - HARRY CREWS [1935- ]

“Alcohol whipped me. Alcohol and I had many, many marvelous times together. We laughed, we talked, we danced at the party together; then one day I woke up and the band had gone home and I was lying in the broken glass with a shirt full of puke and I said, ‘Hey, man, the ball game’s up’.” [Editor’s Note: According to published reports, Crews has been sober since 1987. Way to go, Harry!]
#6 - JACK LONDON [1876-1916]

“I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me. The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was no time, in all my waking time, that I didn’t want a drink. I began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with a drink.”

#5 - F. SCOTT FITZGERALD [1896-1940]

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

#4 - WILLIAM FAULKNER [1897-1962]

“There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.”

#3 - EDGAR ALLAN POE [1809-49]

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”

#2 - ERNEST HEMINGWAY [1899-1961]

“An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.” - Hemingway

#1 - CHARLES BUKOWSKI [1920-94] & HUNTER S. THOMPSON [1937-2005]

“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” - Thompson