Flann O'Brien Quotes

If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.

All men, even those we call savages, have been so tormented by the passion for strong drinks, that limited as their capacities were, they were yet able to manufacture them.

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

But who is it that has made my people drunk? Indians cannot make whiskey. Indians do not sell it. But white people make it and bring it among us. It is they that have brought the evil upon us and we cannot remove it. The white people can remove it and now we call upon them to do it. We ask them to take their whiskey and run away, and leave us sober as they found us.

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

For my most of my career I've been a falling-down drunk. Most of my interviews were done hungover, and for a while it was great.

You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.

I had to stop drinking alcohol, because I used to wake up nude in front of my car with my keys in my ass.

the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.

A man who's intoxicated all the time doesn't need sympathy.

It were better for a man to be subject to any vice than to drunkenness; for all other vanities and sins are recovered, but a drunkard will never shake off the delight of beastliness.

Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in this own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol.

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'.

When I was a practicing alcoholic, I was unbelievable. One side effect was immense suspicion: I'd come off tour like Inspector Clouseau on acid. 'Where's this cornflake come from? It wasn't here before.

Drunks conjure an endless drama from their bottles.

I have been drunk now for over two weeks.

I can drink like a fish, or at least, someone born with fetal alcohol syndrome.

When a man has been intemperate so long that shame no longer paints a blush upon his cheek, his liquor generally does it instead.

I'm drowning in whiskey river.

I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.

Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.

Alcohol is an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind.

Booze is the most outrageous of drugs which is why I chose it.

I thought I was fooling people. But it's the old thing of 'they say vodka doesn't smell'. No, not until you sweat. And you just lie and lie and you think 'I can deal with this'. And then you finally go, 'No you can't'. And then you give up.

And it occurs to me that if I were aboard a rowboat floating in the middle of all the beer I've drunk in a lifetime, I'd never be able to see the shore.