Joe E. Lewis Quotes

I know I'm drinking myself to a slow death, but then I'm in no hurry.

I envy people who drink - at least they know what to blame everything on.

Drunkenness was extremely common… It seemed for many the only refuge from depression and misery. The effect of drunkenness upon the ordinary relationship of husband and wife, parents and children, was disastrous.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.

Here's to alcohol: the cause of, and answer to, all of life's problems.

But when alcohol comes in, start running. Because there's a demon there, and it goes back to her childhood.

Drinking intensifies all your pressures and your needs.

I took a bottle of pills. I'd been in Europe and I had a lot of absinthe and I was just drinking and drinking, trying to, you know, just shut my body down.

I didn't do drugs. It wasn't my thing. But the drink was terrible. Today when I look back, it's like I was another person. You could call it a coping mechanism, but that would be an excuse. I just drank too much.

You have problems, you think drink helps, then you have two problems.

First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man.

It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict. It is the need to escape from a harsh reality.

The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity. What one of us but can call to mind some relative more promising in youth than all his fellows, who has fallen a sacrifice to his rapacity?

When I was drinking I was thinking I was having a good time but it came back twice as bad, the depression. It was just a vicious circle - drinking, not caring about myself - and it gave me a bad low.

I was always playing the hard-bitten drunk.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

I had the taste of the alcohol since I was 11. It allowed me to be clever, charming and to behave outrageously. Acting also allowed me not to be me. So I could indulge every fantasy in this paradise of America.

This is the way I look when I'm sober. That's enough to make a person drink, wouldn't you say?

I think drugs were used by me as a way of suppressing my natural spirit.

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.

I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.

The sky was falling down on me and I spent most of the time drunk. It was the only way I could handle it.

I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one half his days and mad the other.

People who drink to drown their sorrow should be told that sorrow knows how to swim.

I knew I couldn't solve it. Because I couldn't figure out what made her drink when things were going well.