Jeffrey Bernard Quotes

It's that idea that you can have one drink - and no you can't. Within a week I was drinking heavily. It was so quick that even I was like, 'Wow.'

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.

It's that idea that you can have one drink - and no you can't. Within a week I was drinking heavily. It was so quick that even I was like, 'Wow.' Because you have that initial warm feeling going, 'Oh, I remember this'. And your body does, too. And your body goes, 'Yeah, so do I'. Then the demon voice comes, 'Yeah, so do I. You know what would be great? You know we bought a little bottle before? A full bottle would be wonderful'.

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

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

If there was a pill that allowed you to drink and not get drunk, an alcoholic would go "What happens if you take two?"

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

Nobody understands that by the time the addiction has set in the alcoholic is mandated to drink ... he cannot not drink! Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, 'Jiminy Cricket, I feel sensational! My life is really in great shape! I think I'll become an alcoholic!' I firmly believe that when a shaking-to-pieces alcoholic says he needs a drink or he will die, he means it.

I never had one beer. If I bought a six-pack of beer, I kept drinking till all six beers were gone. You have to have that kind of understanding about yourself. I haven't had a drink now in 12 years.

Why do alcoholics begin down the same hazardous road day after day? They are in search of that elusive window of well-being that opens when you drink your way out of a hangover and aren't yet drunk all over again. The alcoholic's day consists of trying to keep that window open.

That's sort of what I felt... I miss drinking, I thought bars were truly holy places.

I had what AA calls 'a convincer' - which made me realize that I couldn't do it any more. I went out drinking for about 70 hours here in London. At the end I knew I was done.

I have a very powerful form of alcoholism. I finally gave up and accepted the fact that if I even smell too much booze, I'm going to start drinking again. That's just how I am.

Alcoholism is a complicated disease, and you never know when you'll be tempted to pick up another drink.

The only result my father got for his money was the certainty that his son had laid faultlessly the foundation of a system of heavy drinking and could be always relied upon to make a break of at least twenty-five even with a bad cue.

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.

The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help they have no hope.

I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.

I'm glad I don't have a drinking problem,' I confided, 'because I don't think I'd ever be able to quit.

I don't have a drink problem. But if that was the case and doctors told me I had to stop, I'd like to think that I would be brave enough to drink myself into the grave.

Alcoholism is the only disease that you can get yelled at for having.

I've been drunk only once in my life. But that lasted for twenty-three years.

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.

An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.