Flann O'Brien Quotes

In my family, they were all big boozers.

I was not a good father in my first marriage. Although there are ways of deserting the family without leaving physically, I was deserted in my head. I was always out, always in the saloons, always drinking, always messing about.

The more necessary it becomes to stop drinking, the more impossible it becomes to stop.

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 used to get drunk every night until I puked. Finally I admitted, "I am a bulemic".

If I hadn't been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.

There's nothing romantic, nothing grand, nothing heroic, nothing brave, nothing like that about drinking. It's a real coward's death.

I was always playing the hard-bitten drunk.

You can't drown yourself in drink. I've tried, you float.

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.

They all went into the bar business. Which was a mistake, because they began to sip at the merchandise and it set them back, set us all back. Well, them more than I.

One drink is too many for me and a thousand not enough.

I'm not a heavy drinker, I can sometimes go for hours without touching a drop.

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

This government can't afford two drunkards. You've got to stop.

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?

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.

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 went off the rails for a few years with drink and different things.

Well I have a drug history and a public drinking problem and I am not the healthiest guy. So they just ran that I died of a drug overdose.

Greatness of any kind has no greater foe than a habit of drinking.

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.

What's the difference between bulimics and anorexics?" I ask. "Anorexics are anorexics all the time," she says, "I'm only bulimic when I'm throwing up." Wow. She sounds just like my dad! "I'm only an alcoholic when I get drunk." There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. Penelope gorges on her pain and then throws it up and flushes it away. My dad drinks his pain away. (107)

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