Famous Martini Quotes

You know who we been living with for the past week? We been living with the only man in history who ever took a piece in the ladies’ can of a Boston & Maine train. When the conductor caught him in there with his Winter Carnival date she screamed, ‘He trapped me!’ and that’s how he got his name. This is the famous Trapper John. God, Trapper, I speak for the Duke as well as myself when I say it’s an honor to have you with us. Have a martini, Trapper.

Worrying about parents is a waste of time. It’s your life. Let’s have a martini.

Perhaps the sadness here is that Plath and Sexton somehow could not quite gather the strength to truly believe in their self-worth, and in the end neither gave themselves time to.

Now we’re going to set the features,” says Theo. He lifts one of the man’s eyelids and packs tufts of cotton underneath to fill out the lid the way the man’s eyeballs once did. Oddly, the culture I associate most closely with cotton, the Egyptians, did not use their famous Egyptian cotton for plumping out withered eyes. The ancient Egyptians put pearl onions in there. Onions. Speaking for myself, if I had to have a small round martini garnish inserted under my eyelids, I would go with olives.

I have strict ideas, you know, about how a martini should be made. Controversially, I prefer vodka, not gin. It must be ice-cold, and extremely dry. Vermouth originated in Milan; and Noël Coward once famously quipped that the nearest a martini should ever get to vermouth was a wave of the glass in the general direction of Italy. I agree, and I was careful to add only a drop or two, for the merest whisper of vermouth. This was an excellent vermouth, fortunately—French, not Italian—and kept chilled in the fridge, as it should be.

Why do people only want to hear the story of how a future celebrity got all mixed up and knocked around in the big martini shaker of youth, until something—ambition, resilience, a lucky break, a dear friend’s death—poured out a famous person, alchemically mixologized into a perfect cocktail, refreshing and delicious?