64 Quotes About Alcohol

Alcohol has long been a source of inspiration, contemplation, and camaraderie throughout history. Whether raising a glass in celebration or reflecting on the nuances of life over a quiet drink, many have found ways to articulate the complex relationship humans have with this age-old elixir. From witty remarks that bring a smile to your face to profound insights that make you ponder the nature of indulgence, quotes about alcohol capture a vast range of emotions and experiences. In this collection, we explore 64 memorable quotes about alcohol, offering perspectives from writers, comedians, and thinkers who have shared their thoughts on its role in our lives. So, pour yourself a drink, relax, and delve into these reflections that celebrate the multifaceted nature of alcohol.

1. “it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance” - William Shakespeare

2. “Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common.” - David Sedaris

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

4. “There are two kinds of people I don't trust: people who don't drink and people who collect stickers.” - Chelsea Handler

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

6. “Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.” - Kingsley Amis

7. “I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.” - Tom Waits

8. “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds, and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.” - George Best

9. “It began to falter not when the book publishers who loved books gave way to those who preferred profits to reading. It happened when publishers and editors cut back on their drinking. If there is one national flower in book publishing, it is the martini.” - Al Silverman

10. “There'a a phrase, "the elephant in the living room", which purports to describe what it's like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, "How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn't you see the elephant in the living room?" And it's so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth; "I'm sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn't know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture." There comes an aha-moment for some folks - the lucky ones - when they suddenly recognize the difference.” - Stephen King

11. “The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: "booze affects material as it does people.” - Alice Sebold

12. “I think the warning labels on alcoholic beverages are too bland. They should be more vivid. Here is one I would suggest: "Alcohol will turn you into the same asshole your father was.” - George Carlin

13. “I was glad to be made awarethat “Veimke” (jeune fille au pair),is subject to natural law,and can be made fat,by such things as poor diet,and alcohol.” - Roman Payne

14. “All my favorite establishments were either overly crowded or pathetically empty. People either sipped fine vintages in celebration or gulped intoxicants of who cares what kind, drowning themselves in a lack of moderation, raising a glass to lower inhibitions, imbibing spirits to raise their own. ” - Monique Truong

15. “Mr Cobb was my escort. Such a nice escort, Mr Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that brief flashing moment, soon buried in time, but never forgotten - when Larry Cobb was sober.” - Raymond Chandler

16. “[Alcohol] not only replaces positive actions which would address the root causes of our despondency – it prevents them, as more energy becomes focused on achieving and recovering from the drunken state.” - CrimethInc.

17. “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

18. “I lay in bed that night, a first-time drunkard at seven years of age, pondering the punishment I knew would arrive on callused palms. In the forest, as if sensing my plight, wolves howled nocturnal laments. The magnificent lunar lullabies of my lupine brethren wooed me into a deep and cleansing sleep.” - Mark Rice

19. “At first I assumed he was a Mexican, but slowly began to realise that a real Mexican probably wouldn't be wearing a sombrero in a London nightclub. And he'd probably have a real moustache, not a stick-on one. A Mexican with a stick-on moustache would be like a Super-Mexican, because he'd have two moustaches, and that'd be cool, because a Super-Mexican could probably use his poncho as a cape, and then I realised I was saying all this to the man's face.” - Danny Wallace

20. “I am not your victim because you are not a predator any more than a bottle of scotch stalks an alcoholic.” - Sue William Silverman

21. “You're walking down Fool's Street, Laura used to say when he was drinking, and she had been right. He had known even then that she was right, but knowing had made no difference; he had simply laughed at her fears and gone on walking down it, till finally he had stumbled and fell. Then, for a long time, he stayed away, and if he had stayed away long enough he would have been all right; but one night he began walking down it again - and met the girl. It was inevitable that on Fool's Street there should be women as well as wine.He had walked down it many times in many different towns, and now he was walking down it once again in yet another town. Fool's Street never changed, no matter where you went, and this one was no different from the others. The same skeletonic signs bled beer names in vacant windows; the same winos sat in doorways nursing muscatel; the same drunk tank awaited you when at last your reeling footsteps failed. And if the sky was darker than usual, it was only because of the rain which had begun falling early that morning and been falling steadily ever since.” - Robert F. Young

22. “I automatically assume people won't like me, so I don't talk to them unless they approach me first. I can't become a part of a crowd because I can't get past that feeling that I don't belong.” - Stephanie Kuehnert

23. “Hi, this is Ganymede, cup-bearer to Zeus, and when I'm out buying wine for the Lord of the Skies, I always buckle up!” - Rick Riordan

24. “Cover your glass in France or Germany --even worse, in England - and in the voice of someone who has personally affronted, your host will ask why you're not drinking. 'Oh, I just don't feel like it this morning.''Why not?''I guess I'm not in the mood?''Well, this'll put you in the mood. Here. Drink up.''No, really, I'm OK.''Just taste it.''Actually, I'm sort of...well, I sort of have a problem with it.''Then how about half a glass?” - David Sedaris

25. “Shan stared at his glass, then lifted it under his nose. It was the closest he would knowingly get to tasting the hard liquor. It was not because it would violate the vows of the monks, which he had not taken, but because somehow it felt as though it would violate his teachers who still sat behind prison wire in Lhadrung.” - Eliot Pattison

26. “How is it that everyone on this train has so much alcohol?""We always head to Canada at the beginning of the season," she says taking her seat again. "Their laws are much more civilized. Cheers.” - Sara Gruen

27. “That's what was wrong with drinking too much. You became immune to drunken delights. There was no solace in liquor. Before you got happy, you collapsed.” - Richard Matheson

28. “Jon:'What are you doing up there? Why aren't you at the feast?'Tyrion: 'Too hot, too noisy, and I'd drunk too much wine', the dwarf told him. 'I learned long ago that it is considered rude to vomit on your brother.” - George R.R. Martin

29. “To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.” - Caroline Knapp

30. “The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life.For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.” - Alain De Botton

31. “People, heed my warning: That stuff is Specials Olympics in a pint glass. You think they are harmless and not very strong, and the next thing you know it is an hour later and you are in the bathroom of the bar with your pants off, surrounded by five girls, giving your boxers to a bachelorette party because one of the girls is cute and told you that you had a nice butt. Be forewarned. - from the Austin Road Trip story” - Tucker Max

32. “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

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

34. “When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate.” - Jeffrey Bernard

35. “His abhorrence and fear of alcohol did not extend to his power as host. He kept a huge cupboard of drinks in the station house and loved to serve large measures to visiting relatives--especially those he disliked--about which there was a definite element of spreading bait for garden snails.” - John McGahern

36. “The others would then fall silent and she would continue about doped gallium arsenide detectors, or the ethanol content of the galactic cloud W-3. The quantity of 200-proof alcohol in this single interstellar cloud was more than enough to maintain the present population of the Earth, if every adult were a dedicated alcoholic, for the age of the solar system. The tamada had appreciated the remark.” - Carl Sagan

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

38. “Come boy, and pour for me a cupOf old Falernian. Fill it upWith wine, strong, sparkling, bright, and clear;Our host decrees no water here.Let dullards drink the Nymph's pale brew,The sluggish thin their blood with dew.For such pale stuff we have no use;For us the purple grape's rich juice.Begone, ye chilling water sprite;Here burning Bacchus rules tonight!” - Catullus

39. “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

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

41. “Bottled, was he?" Said Colonel Bantry, with an Englishman's sympathy for alcoholic excess. "Oh, well, can't judge a fellow by what he does when he's drunk? When I was at Cambridge, I remember I put a certain utensil - well - well, nevermind.” - Agatha Christie

42. “If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.” - Bill Hicks

43. “I find that when people laugh it's usually because they're connecting and identifying in a way that they hadn't considered. That's my payoff. I'm not interested in other people thinking differently. I don't care. I'm just like yeast - I eat sugar and I shit alcohol. And there's a huge culture that goes with that. Alcohol creates massive shifts in world history, and it changes people's lives. People get pregnant because of alcohol. But the yeast doesn't give a fuck. The yeast isn't going, "I really want to help people loosen up and bring passion into Irish people's lives".” - Louis C. K.

44. “Cannabis sativa and its derivatives are strictly prohibited in Turkey, and the natural correlative of this proscription is that alcohol, far from being frowned upon as it is in other Moslem lands, is freely drunk; being a government monopoly it can be bought at any cigarette counter. This fact is no mere detail; it is of primary social importance, since the psychological effects of the two substances are diametrically opposed to each other. Alcohol blurs the personality by loosening inhibitions. The drinker feels, temporarily at least, a sense of participation. Kif abolishes no inhibitions; on the contrary it reinforces them, pushes the individual further back into the recesses of his own isolated personality, pledging him to contemplation and inaction. It is to be expected that there should be a close relationsip between the culture of a given society and the means used by its members to achieve release and euphoria. For Judaism and Christianity the means has always been alcohol; for Islam it has been hashish. The first is dynamic in its effects, the other static. If a nation wishes, however mistakenly, to Westernize itself, first let it give up hashish. The rest will follow, more or less as a manner of course. Conversely, in a Western country, if a whole segment of the population desires, for reasons of protest (as has happened in the United States), to isolate itself in a radical fashion from the society around it, the quickest and surest way is for it to replace alcohol by cannabis.” - Paul Bowles

45. “Like a great fool, I went ashore with them, and they gave me some cursed stuff they called gin, - such blasphemy I never heard! At first when they told me they had set up a great distillery of gin, I thought them very useful, clever, good men; for you know, captain, any nation might be converted by hollands; -but this was the unchristianest beastliest liquor I ever tasted, and it made me - as I feel now. Yet the foolish, idiot-people of the island think it very good, because it makes them mad-drunk, and they believe Heaven sent it; but it made me believe the devil had got amongst them.” - Edward John Trelawny

46. “I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one-half his days and mad the other.” - Anne Brontë

47. “Sembra che io abbia una costituzione che non regge l'alcol e ancor di meno l'idiozia e l'incoerenza.” - Jack Kerouac

48. “Sex mirrored our drinking; both defined our relationship: selfish, detached, indulgent and satisfying.” - BJ Neblett

49. “Alcohol lowered inhibitions. It didn't create impulses that weren't there.” - Chelsea Scott

50. “My point about alcohol is that if you abuse something, it abuses you back.” - Michka Assayas

51. “There is more food in a pennyworth of bread than in a gallon of ale.” - Joseph Livesey

52. “There was something ghost-like and insubstantial about gases to these early chemists. They called liquids that turned into gases easily, "spirits." Methyl alcohol, they called "wood spirit"; ethyl alcohol, "wine spirit." Even today, alcoholic beverages are frequently referred to as "spirits." (Modern Arabs, from whose language the word "alcohol" was taken, call ethyl alcohol "spirit" from the English. This is a queer exchange.)” - Isaac Asimov

53. “„Tik išgėręs žmogus su malonumu gali prisiminti ką nors nemalonaus iš savo gyvenimo.” - Sigitas Parulskis

54. “Booze makes you stupid and like it. It makes you fall around and not care. And eventually, stupid is the only way you know how to be. Cocaine makes you feel important, that life matters, that you matter. That the music is better than it really is. That every conversation is profound and that all pretenses have been stripped away. Ecstasy makes you dance all night and love your friends so much, in a way that you've never been able to tell them about before. Acid makes you see pretty colours and makes things breathe. But Sadness, there is nothing like Sadness.” - pleasefindthis

55. “Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

56. “Blackouts can be fun if approached with the right mindset. You just can't sweat the fact that you've lost a small portion of your life for all eternity. Occasionally, little bubbles of memory will float up like surreal Mylar party balloons at unexpected times throughout the net day and start piecing together a colorful, if incomplete, version of reality.” - Josh Kilmer-Purcell

57. “Alcohol was for people who basically wished to be dead but lacked the courage to kill themselves.” - MacDonald Harris

58. “Scientists have invented a new strain of cannabis without the high. They celebrated with non-alcoholic beer and furious dry-humping.” - Stephen Colbert

59. “I believe in 'Positives' not Negatives the only thing about Alcohol I'm Powerless over is those Damn Taxes” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

60. “When my pals in high school were starting to drink, it always looked unappealing to me. I would be at a big party and see one of the popular girls or football players completely wasted and puking and acting a fool, and think to myself, There’s nothing cool about that. I never wanted to be that out of control.” - Kathy Griffin

61. “It's six o'clock; my drink is at the three-quarter mark - three-quarters down not three-quarters up - and the night begins.("New York Blues")” - Cornell Woolrich

62. “I sit there and think how it isn't fair that I can't drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.” - Augusten Burroughs

63. “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

64. “The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.” - Helen Bevington