100 Memorable Drinking Quotes

Raise your glass and prepare for a delightful journey into the world of wit and wisdom with our curated collection of the top 100 memorable drinking quotes. Whether you're a connoisseur of fine spirits or someone who appreciates the occasional toast, these quotes capture the essence of camaraderie, joy, and the timeless allure of a drink well enjoyed. From literary giants to contemporary voices, each quote offers a unique perspective on the rituals and revelries associated with drinking. So, sit back, pour yourself a favorite beverage, and immerse yourself in these spirited words that have resonated across generations. Cheers to finding the perfect quote that speaks to your soul!

1. “After the first glass of vodkayou can accept just about anythingof life even your own mysteriousnessyou think it is nice that a boxof matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Swedenfor they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?” - Frank O'Hara

2. “The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the effect of which is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.” - Douglas Adams

3. “Drinking is fun! It makes me feel horrible and sexy!” - Warren Ellis

4. “Now tequila may be the favored beverage of outlaws but that doesn't mean it gives them preferential treatment. In fact, tequila probably has betrayed as many outlaws as has the central nervous system and dissatisfied wives. Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!” - Tom Robbins

5. “When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.” - C.S. Forester

6. “It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

7. “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.” - Edgar Allan Poe

8. “Next to music, beer was best.” - Carson McCullers

9. “There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.” - Raymond Chandler

10. “Fell in love with a beautiful blonde once. Drove me to drink. And I never had the decency to thank her.” - W.C. Fields

11. “Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

12. “We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.” - David Sedaris

13. “Ho! Ho! Ho! To the bottle I goTo heal my heart and drown my woeRain may fall, and wind may blowAnd many miles be still to goBut under a tall tree will I lieAnd let the clouds go sailing by” - J.R.R. Tolkien

14. “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.” - Ogden Nash

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

16. “I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.” - Anne Lamott

17. “One more drink and I'll be under the host.” - Mae West

18. “When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.” - Jimmy Breslin

19. “Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience. 'I feel really guilty about getting drunk last night,' we say, when in actual fact we feel no guilt whatsoever or, at least, we could choose to feel no guilt. When people say to me, 'I drank too much last night,' I always reply, 'I drank exactly the right amount.” - Tom Hodgkinson

20. “Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so?There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.” - Drew Carey

21. “They say the only people who tell the truth are drunkards and children. Guess which one I am.” - Stephen Colbert

22. “A lady came up to me one day and said 'Sir! You are drunk', to which I replied 'I am drunk today madam, and tomorrow I shall be sober but you will still be ugly.” - Winston Churchill

23. “In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.” - Benjamin Franklin

24. “Drinking just to get drunk is like having sex just to get pregnant.” - Robert Hess

25. “Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.” - Oscar Wilde

26. “Do you drink?""Of course,I just said I was a writer.” - Stephen King

27. “So much the worse for those who fear wine, for it is because they have some bad thoughts which they are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts.” - Alexandre Dumas

28. “There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.” - Graham Greene

29. “Are you there vodka? It's me, Chelsea. Please get me out of jail and I promise I will never drink again. Drink and drive. I will never drink and drive again. I may even start my own group fashioned after MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but I'll call it AWLTDASH, Alcoholics Who Like to Drink and Stay Home.” - Chelsea Handler

30. “Ignorance is a lot like alcohol: the more you have of it, the less you are able to see its effect on you.” - Jay Bylsma

31. “They're professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don't forget that the Russians - any Russian - can drink you under the table.” - Anthony Bourdain

32. “You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.” - Tom Waits

33. “Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.” - Dudley Moore

34. “For the first twenty years of my life, I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually, I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it’s funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even made it to the bed. I’d squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I’m now told that this is not called “going to sleep” but rather “passing out,” a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment.” - David Sedaris

35. “Those partial to drink were hiding faults and dishonesty. They were sloppy souls, even the ones with pleasant manners and fine noses.” - Sarah Hall

36. “Elliot Rawley was a drinker, Cy’s mother had been right. And he was a poor drinker. One that let the demons of the bottle into his head when he tipped it back, demons that went about unloosing all the trouble they could find stashed in the catacombs of his mind. Every tragic thing that had ever happened, every self-doubt, every delusion, freed itself from bondage and revisited him when he drank.” - Sarah Hall

37. “I went out with a guy who once told me I didn’t need to drink to make myself more fun to be around. I told him, I’m drinking so that you’re more fun to be around.” - Chelsea Handler

38. “The only cure for a real hangover is death.” - Robert Benchley

39. “Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.” - Jim Butcher

40. “I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it.” - Mark Twain

41. “I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.” - Sylvia Plath

42. “Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT."Albert: "Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them.” - Terry Pratchett

43. “Think of me as an impetuous Hegel, drunk with power, and also, regular drunk.” - Eugene Mirman

44. “Fill with mingled cream and amber, I will drain that glass again.Such hilarious visions clamber Through the chamber of my brain —Quaintest thoughts — queerest fancies Come to life and fade away;What care I how time advances? I am drinking ale today.” - Edgar Allan Poe

45. “Rumor had it that he was homosexual; in reality, in recent years, he was simply a garden-variety alcoholic.” - Michel Houellebecq

46. “Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment--that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect.” - Douglas Coupland

47. “Glasses are for people that sips instead of drinks.” - Kai Starr

48. “I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” - Dorothy Parker

49. “At the time I started in ballet they were dancing 'The Spirit of Champagne' on pointe, in Paris. I thought, 'I don't want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it!” - Martha Graham

50. “It was my Uncle George who discovered alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.” - P.G. Wodehouse

51. “If you see the dragon fly,best you drink the flagon dry.”—Zarost” - Greg Hamerton

52. “I've gotten more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” - Winston S. Churchill

53. “In Mississippi the important thing is hooch, not bar equipment.” - Florence King

54. “Beer bottles, whiskey bottles, brown glass, green. They fell to the lawn and I'd feel serene. Adam was king to my stilted queen.” - Kate Bernheimer

55. “Quite possibly one of the most revealing passages about Shakespeare as a man comes from one of the roughest of the jottings made by gossip John Aubrey from his interview with William Beeston, son of the Christopher Beeston who had acted with Shakespeare's company. The partly cancelled note reads: 'the more to be admired, he was not a company keeper. [He] ... wouldn't be debauched, and if invited to, writ [i.e. wrote] he was in pain.' [Ch.24]” - Ian Wilson

56. “Ale, man, Ale's the stuff to drink,for fellows whom it hurts to think.” - A.E. Housman

57. “Ive created a new drink! I'm calling it the Piñata Colada! Its sweet and tasty, but when you wake up the next morning your head feels like its been hitten with a stick.” - José N. Harris

58. “Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning... No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire novel's worth of thought would have to be expended on each one. His attention had only to lapse for a moment, between preposition and object, colophon and chapter heading, for dead spots to appear like gangrene that would rot the whole. Silkworms didn't work as finely or as patiently as he must, and yet boldness was all, the large stroke, the end contained in and prophesied by the beginning, the stains of his clouds infinitely various but all signifying sunrise. Unity in diversity, all that guff. An enormous weariness flew over him. The trouble with drink, he had long known, wasn't that it started up these large things but that it belittled the awful difficulties of their execution. ("Novelty")” - John Crowley

59. “You don’t need to drink to get over your feelings. Deal with your feelings that’s how you get over them,” - Holly Hood

60. “I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.” - Irwin Shaw

61. “الرب أعطى النقود، والشيطان صنع ثقباً. وها هي نقود الرب تتسرب عبر ثقب الشيطان.” - Valentin Rasputin

62. “Drinking is such a necessity to human life that people cannot fathom an individual who, like a child confined to a church pew, gets little enjoyment out of it and would rather do other things.” - Criss Jami

63. “Drunken men give some of the best pep talks.” - Criss Jami

64. “An over-indulgence of anything, even something as pure as water, can intoxicate.” - Criss Jami

65. “Here, drink your liqueur," Henry said, tossing back her drink. "I carry it with me everywhere because it's the only kind of drink that Leo doesn't like, so there's a chance I'll still have some tomorrow.” - Eloisa James

66. “They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think.” - Ellis Peters

67. “Where had he been? Drinking, obviously. Then she started cataloging all the ways he was worthless. On fool impulse, as his most potent available argument against Lily, Bud stuck his hands into his coat pockets and pulled out the many bundles of hundreds and threw them on the bedspread. If you were honest and stupid, you worked a couple of lifetimes for that kind of money, doled out by the hour in pocket-change amounts by asswipe bosses.” - Charles Frazier

68. “She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?” - Toni Morrison

69. “When I got to college, the fake ID thing wasn't that important, since pretty much everyone could get away with drinking in New Orleans. But the drugs, well, that was a different story altogether, because drugs are every bit as illegal in New Orleans as anywhere else--at least, if you're black and poor, and have the misfortune of doing your drugs somewhere other than the dorms at Tulane University. But if you are lucky enough to be living at Tulane, which is a pretty white place, especially contrasted with the city where it's located, which is 65 percent black, then you are absolutely set.” - Tim Wise

70. “I like to see the glass as half full, hopefully of jack daniels.” - Darynda Jones

71. “I will never, ever drink whiskey again. From now on, it's strictly sherry.” - Libba Bray

72. “Camels can go many weeks without drinking anything at all. The notion that they cache water in their humps is pure myth—their humps are made of fat, and water is stored in their body tissues. While other mammals draw water from bloodstreams when faced with dehydration, leading to death by volume shock, camels tap the water in their tissues, keeping their blood volume stable. Though this reduces the camel’s bulk, they can lose up to a third of their body weight with no ill effects, which they can replace astonishingly quickly, as they are able to drink up to forty gallons in a single watering.” (pp.69-70)” - Michael Benanav

73. “One sip of this will bathe the drooping spirits in delight, beyond the bliss of dreams.” - John Milton

74. “The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the patron was not mean about drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a plongeur is not given two litres he will steal three.” - George Orwell

75. “And in my mind, this settles the issue. I would never drink cologne, and am therefore not an alcoholic.” - Augusten Burroughs

76. “Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

77. “Two wives despaired of him,’ he said. ‘When he got engaged to Sylvia, she made it a condition that he should take the cure at Zurich. And it worked. He came back in three months a different man. And he hasn't touched a drop since, even though Sylvia walked out on him.’ ‘Why did she do that?’Well, poor Charlie got rather a bore when he stopped drinking. But that’s not really the point of the story.” - Evelyn Waugh

78. “I feel like today should be a perfect Meatball day... Let's just get wastey-pants!” - Snooki

79. “Taking a couple short backup swigs, Flint’s crippling headache started to release its grip, sort of the way he imagined an octopus would release an inedible bowling ball.” - Cole Alpaugh

80. “Jem grinned. “Where have you been? The Blue Dragon? The Mermaid?” “The Devil Tavern if you must know.” Will sighed and leaned against one of the posts of the bed. “I had such plans for the evening. The pursuit of blind drunkenness and wayward women was my goal. But alas, it was not to be. No sooner had I consumed my third drink in the Devil than I was accosted by a delightful small flower-selling child who asked me for two-pence for a daisy. The price seemed steep, so I refused. When I told the girl as much, she proceeded to rob me.” “A little girl robbed you?” Tessa said. “Actually, she wasn’t a little girl at all, as it turns out, but a midget in a dress who goes by the name of Six-Fingered Nigel.” “Easy mistake to make,” Jem said.” - Cassandra Clare

81. “If I show up on your doorstep don't worry I'm just there to party.” - Kenny D. Eichenberg

82. “I'm drinking away the exam results that don't take me anywhere.” - Steven Herrick

83. “He dozed off, into a dreamless oblivion, for what seemed like seconds but was in fact hours, and awoke hungover, the inner surface of his skull pulsing like a single, giant nerve being chewed by some ruminant animal.” - Alex Shakar

84. “There’s something wonderful about drinking in the afternoon. A not-too-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar – even in this fake-ass Irish pub.” - Anthony Bourdain

85. “Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?” - Graham Greene

86. “BALLS! We want the finest wines available to humanity. We want them HERE, and we want them NOW.” - Bruce Robinson

87. “the only drinking problem I've ever had, is figuring out why I'm still stuck in this salad spinner” - Josh Stern

88. “Pops: How about you finish this sentence for me, Jason? When a girl says no she means...Justin, looking desperately at me: No?Nana: Are you sure?Justin, shifting uncomfortably: I'm sure. No means no.Nana: Well look at you. You got one right. Now here's another, even tougher sentence for you to finish. Premarital sex is...Me: Nana! I'm so sorry Justin.Nana: Unlike Pops, I'm not moving on. Justin?Pops: His name is Jason.Justin:Uh....uh....Pops: While you think about that, why don't you tell me how you feel about drinking and driving?Justin: I'm totally against it, I swear!Nana: Methinks he protests too much.” - Gena Showalter

89. “He stopped complaining, but now I was annoyed. I went to the roof and drank alone.” - Haruki Murakami

90. “On the other side of the ledger stood the fact that fotitude was useless against it (liquor). Even the mightiest potsman, a paladin who could match tankards with a whole alehouse of swag-bellies Falstaffs and outquaff the parcel of them, would see his length measured upon the floor by less liquid than it would take to fill his hat.” - David Wondrich

91. “I guess I forgot we were going out tonight.""We always go out on Fridays.""It's Thursday, Alvis.""You are so tied to routine.” - Jess Walter

92. “There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.” - Ernest Hemingway

93. “I'd often slip and fall on the ice after last call, which explained the ever-present welts. If I were with a woman, I'd usually execute a precautionary vomit in the men's room in an effort avoid any ugly incidents once I got her back to her place. And they say chivalry is dead.” - Dan Dunn

94. “I can't die until the government finds a safe place to bury my liver” - Phil Harris

95. “The bubbly play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resonant voices of men when glass in hand they shut the grey world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse.” - Jack London

96. “I tried that too, you know. After ... my family was murdered, and I was waiting for justice, I tried to hide inside a bottle. But some men, Tony, [..] are not small enough to fit into a bottle.” - Aleksandr Voinov

97. “It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.” - Sherman Alexie

98. “I mean, that's at least in part why I ingested chemical waste - it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read.I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less, so I took more - simple as that. Anyway, I eventually decided that the reason Dr. Stone had told me I was hypomanic was that he wanted to put me on medication instead of actually treating me. So I did the only rational thing I could do in the face of such as insult - I stopped talking to Stone, flew back to New York, and married Paul Simon a week later.” - Carrie Fisher

99. “A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking” - Anne Enright

100. “The whiskey kicked like a mugger.” - Ken Bruen