“Civilization begins with distillation.” — William Faulkner (best known for The Sound and the Fury)
“After one drink it’s very hard not to take another, and after three it is even harder not to take three more.” — James Agee (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men)
“Don’t drink to get drunk. Drink to enjoy life.” — Jack Kerouac (On the Road)
“Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and, late at night, matter not at all.” — Lillian Hellman (The Little Foxes)
“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” — F Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
“You never start out life with the intention of becoming bankrupt or an alcoholic.” — Raymond Carver (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?)
“Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with that it’s compounding a felony.” — Robert Benchley (drama critic for The New Yorker)
“I was always willing to drink when anyone was around. I drank by myself when no one was around.” — Jack London (The Call of the Wild)
“A poet without alcohol is no real poet.” — Conrad Aiken (Earth Triumphant)
“I drink exactly as much as I want, and one drink more.” — H L Mencken (newspaper editor, critic, journalist)
“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” — Hunter S Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
“Who cares what tripped a fallen woman?” — Edna St Vincent Millay (The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems)
“Drinking is a form or suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day.” — Charles Bukowski (poet, novelist, short-story writer)
“When you get drunk there is no difference between you and a lot of drunken advertising men.” — Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio)
“Life is as much a merry tavern as a sad hotel.” — Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire)
“I love parties excessively. That’s the reason I don’t go to them.” — John Cheever (The Wapshot Chronicles)
“At four o’clock in the morning, when everybody’s drunk enough, then extraordinary thinks can happen.” — James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain)
“If I had my life to live over again, I’d live over a saloon.” — W C Fields (comedian, actor, juggler, writer)
“What’s the use of winning a Nobel Prize if it doesn’t even get you into speakeasies?” — Sinclair Lewis (Arrowsmith)
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Hemingway, Edward and Bailey, Mark. Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Famous Writers. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006
Well-known works are given for most authors above but the quote won’t necessarily be found in that work.