Fitzgerald Drinking Quotes

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

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

It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.

There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.

Dick walked beside her, feeling her unhappiness, and wanting to drink the rain that touched her cheek.

Have a drink Tom and then you won't feel so foolish to yourself.

We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them -

The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn't drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it's what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter.

What are you going to do? "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass.

And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press, End in the Nothing all Things end in - Yes - Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but what Thou shalt be - Nothing - though shalt not be less.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Afterwards, he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.

There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness.

Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle —

It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food." p. 201

He drinks too much, it’s true, and he has not always been good to me or to himself, but I think he’s broken somewhere inside, and he drinks to try to fill the cracks.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald

You’ve been drinking,” she said shortly, and then added qualitatively, “a little. You know I loathe the smell of it.

The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people.

And yes, the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, the Faulkners and the Capotes. Drank while writing. Drink next to the typewriter. But the longer I lived in Brooklyn, the more writers I met, and I guess I was just too drunk to put it together before but now I realized about half of them were sober. So you could be a writer and be sober. Very interesting

Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy.

In my day, we learned the subtle art of making men think they did it all by themselves. We just fixed our hair and put on our faces and a nice dress and poured the drinks. It's your day now, Audrey Fitzgerald. Don't hide what you can do, not for anyone.

American men,” said Nancy gravely, “don’t know how to drink.” “What?” Jim was startled. “In fact,” she went on carelessly, “they don’t know how to do anything very well. The one thing I regret in my life is that I wasn’t born in England.” “In England?” “Yes. It’s the one regret of my life that I wasn’t.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.

Gatsby took up his drink. ‘They certainly look cool,’ he said, with visible tension. We drank in long greedy swallows.

It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people.

It had been a gay party and different stages of sobriety were represented.

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.

The doctors told me' -- her voice sang on a confidential note-- 'that if any man alive had done the consistent drinking that I have, he would have been physically shattered, my dead, and in his grave--long in his grave.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over... We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them-

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care. Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all—and yet there’s something in that voice of hers….

Scott stared at her mouth, just stared like he was hypnotized, paralyzed, like that crimson O was the answer to all of life’s problems, or maybe just his prayers. I kicked his shin to break the spell, which worked; he blinked, then ate the bite himself as if he’d never even offered it to anyone at all. I looked frankly at Carmel; her expression was innocently amused. There are women whose whole selves are engaged in being a public commodity, and Carmel was one of these. Every gesture she made, every syllable she uttered, the tinkle of her laughter, the way her dress’s fabric draped over her breasts, all of it was self-conscious and deliberate, designed to elicit admiration in women, desire in men. This isn’t to say I held any of that against her. Not a bit. I liked her, in fact. The way I saw it, she was a kind of living work of art, and funny and thoughtful besides. Was it her fault if she, as had happened to me, sometimes provoked the basest feelings in a man? Scott and Fred made short work of that second bottle of brandy while Carmel’s and my glasses still held our initial pour. I’d found that drinking very much of any kind of alcohol still did bad things to my stomach. Carmel might have found that it did bad things to her self-preservation; I know that if I looked like her, I’d never let down my guard.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance-abusing writers are just substance abusers—common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I’ve heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons. It doesn’t matter if you’re James Jones, John Cheever, or a stewbum snoozing in Penn Station; for an addict, the right to the drink or drug of choice must be preserved at all costs. Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.

He could not reconcile himself to her beauty, that was mother to his own, the exquisite neck and shoulders, the grace of a fortunate woman of thirty. "Amory, dear," she crooned softly, "I had such a strange, weird time after I left you." "Did you, Beatrice?" "When I had my last breakdown"—she spoke of it as a sturdy, gallant feat. "The doctors told me"—her voice sang on a confidential note—"that if any man alive had done the consistent drinking that I have, he would have been physically shattered, my dear, and in his grave—long in his grave." Amory winced, and wondered how this would have sounded to Froggy Parker. "Yes," continued Beatrice tragically, "I had dreams—wonderful visions." She pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes. "I saw bronze rivers lapping marble shores, and great birds that soared through the air, parti-colored birds with iridescent plumage. I heard strange music and the flare of barbaric trumpets—what?" Amory had snickered. "What, Amory?" "I said go on, Beatrice." "That was all—it merely recurred and recurred—gardens that flaunted coloring against which this would be quite dull, moons that whirled and swayed, paler than winter moons, more golden than harvest moons——" "Are you quite well now, Beatrice?" "Quite well—as well as I will ever be. I am not understood, Amory. I know that can't express it to you, Amory, but—I am not understood." Amory was quite moved. He put his arm around his mother, rubbing his head gently against her shoulder.

Danny’s Song” by Kenny Loggins “Reminder” by Mumford & Sons “Barton Hollow” by The Civil Wars “Like a Bridge Over Troubled Waters” by Simon and Garfunkel “I and Love and You” by The Avett Brothers “Make You Feel My Love” by Adele “Can’t Break Her Fall” by Matt Kearney  “Stillborn” by Black Label Society “Come On Get Higher” by Matt Nathanson “I Won’t Give Up” by Jason Mraz “This Girl” by City & Colour “My Funny Valentine” by Ella Fitzgerald “Dream a Little Dream of Me” by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong “Stormy Blues” by Billie Holiday “I would be Sad” by The Avett Brothers “Hello, I’m Delaware” by City & Colour “99 Problems” by Hugo (originally written and performed by Jay-Z) “It’s Time” by Imagine Dragons “Let It Be Me” by Ray LaMontagne “Rocketship” by Guster “Don’t Drink The Water” by Dave Matthews Band “Blackbird” by The Beatles

The sixty acres of the estate were dotted with old and new summer houses and many fountains and white benches that came suddenly into sight from foliage-hung hiding-places; there was a great and constantly increasing family of white cats that prowled the many flower-beds and were silhouetted suddenly at night against the darkening trees. It was on one of the shadowy paths that Beatrice at last captured Amory, after Mr. Blaine had, as usual, retired for the evening to his private library. After reproving him for avoiding her, she took him for a long tête-a-tête in the moonlight. He could not reconcile himself to her beauty, that was mother to his own, the exquisite neck and shoulders, the grace of a fortunate woman of thirty. "Amory, dear," she crooned softly, "I had such a strange, weird time after I left you." "Did you, Beatrice?" "When I had my last breakdown"—she spoke of it as a sturdy, gallant feat. "The doctors told me"—her voice sang on a confidential note—"that if any many alive had done the consistent drinking that I have, he would have been physically shattered, my dear, and in his grave—long in his grave." Amory winced, and wondered how this would have sounded to Froggy Parker. "Yes," continued Beatrice tragically, "I had dreams—wonderful visions." She pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes. "I saw bronze rivers lapping marble shores, and great birds that soared through the air, parti-colored birds with iridescent plumage. I heard strange music and the flare of barbaric trumpets—what?" Amory had snickered. "What, Amory?" "I said go on, Beatrice." "That was all—it merely recurred and recurred—gardens that flaunted coloring against which this would be quite dull, moons that whirled and swayed, paler than winter moons, more golden than harvest moons——" "Are you quite well now, Beatrice?" "Quite well—as well as I will ever be. I am not understood, Amory. I know that can't express it to you, Amory, but—I am not understood." Amory was quite moved. He put his arm around his mother, rubbing his head gently against her shoulder.

The past five months of loafing had demoralized him, the underside of his creativity being a destructiveness which tore at himself and others. 'I should like to sit down with [half] dozen chosen companions,' he wrote Perkins, 'and drink myself to death but I am sick alike of life, liquor and literature.

On Writing The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the readers. Running a close second was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing god work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position. The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. Four twentieth century writers; Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers - common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit…. for an addict, the right to the drink or drug of choice must be preserved at all costs. Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because that’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jubs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter. You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put on the pages what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you, or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again, you must not come lightly to the blank page. I am not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I’m not asking you to be politically correct or to cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn’t a popularity contest, it isn’t the moral olympics and it’s not church. But it’s writing, damn it, not washing the car. If you take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you to close the book and do something else.

A SUMMARY OF BRAIN TRAINING FUELING GUIDELINES • Drink only when you’re thirsty during running. But don’t allow your thirst to build—that is, drink as soon as you feel the urge and as often as you feel the urge. Never force yourself to drink more than is comfortable. • Drink during runs lasting longer than one hour and during the recovery periods in shorter, high-intensity interval workouts. • When performance counts, use a sports drink instead of water. Its electrolyte content enhances hydration and its carbohydrate content provides an extra source of energy and stimulates a brain signal that boosts performance. • Consider using a carbohydrate-protein sports drink (Accelerade) instead of a conventional sports drink to promote faster recovery from workouts and perhaps greater long-term fitness gains. • Consider using water or an electrolyte-fortified water instead of a sports drink during some of your long runs to increase the physiological stress of these runs in ways that will enhance your body’s adaptations to them.

Habitual caffeine use such as drinking coffee every day causes the brain to “upregulate” its adenosine receptors. This adaptation makes the brain more sensitive to the action of adenosine so that fewer adenosine molecules must attach themselves to receptors to cause sleepiness and brain slowing. Habituation also makes the brain less sensitive to the actions of caffeine. For runners, caffeine habituation has the important implication that it reduces the drug’s benefit of performance enhancement.

There are two types of nutrition that have the potential to significantly enhance performance when consumed during running: water and carbohydrate. It is no accident that these are the two main ingredients in almost all sports drinks intended for use during exercise. Most

runners throughout the first half of the twentieth century generally avoided drinking anything during long races because they believed that submitting to their thirst would cause them to become “waterlogged” and slow down. One expert of the time wrote, “Don’t get in the habit of drinking and eating in a Marathon race; some prominent runners do, but it is not beneficial.

There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly mustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterward and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents—punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and vases—for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West." --from "The Glass-Cut Bowl" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

And F. Scott Fitzgerald said, ‘First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Visitors to Mason’s Yard in St. James’s will search in vain for Isherwood Fine Arts. They will, however, find the extraordinary Old Master gallery owned by my dear friend Patrick Matthiesen. A brilliant art historian blessed with an infallible eye, Patrick never would have allowed a misattributed work by Artemisia Gentileschi to languish in his storerooms for nearly a half century. The painting depicted in The Cellist does not exist. If it did, it would look a great deal like the one produced by Artemisia’s father, Orazio, that hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Like Julian Isherwood and his new managing partner, Sarah Bancroft, the inhabitants of my version of London’s art world are wholly fictitious, as are their sometimes-questionable antics. Their midsummer drinking session at Wiltons Restaurant would have been entirely permissible, as the landmark London eatery briefly reopened its doors before a rise in coronavirus infection rates compelled Prime Minister Boris Johnson to shut down all non-essential businesses. Wherever possible, I tried to adhere to prevailing conditions and government-mandated restrictions. But when necessary, I granted myself the license to tell my story without the crushing weight of the pandemic. I chose Switzerland as the primary setting for The Cellist because life there proceeded largely as normal until November 2020. That said, a private concert and reception at the Kunsthaus Zürich, even for a cause as worthy as democracy, likely could not have taken place in mid-October. I offer my profound apologies to the renowned Janine Jansen for the unflattering comparison to Anna Rolfe. Ms. Jansen is rightly regarded as one of her generation’s finest violinists, and Anna, of course, exists only in my imagination. She was introduced in the second Gabriel Allon novel, The English Assassin, along with Christopher Keller. Martin Landesmann, my committed if deeply flawed Swiss financier, made his debut in The Rembrandt Affair. The story of Gabriel’s blood-soaked duel with the Russian arms dealer Ivan Kharkov is told in Moscow Rules and its sequel, The Defector. Devotees of F. Scott Fitzgerald undoubtedly spotted the luminous line from The Great Gatsby that appears in chapter 32 of The Cellist. For the record, I am well aware that the headquarters of Israel’s secret intelligence service is no longer located on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. There is no safe house in the historic moshav of Nahalal—at least not one that I am aware of—and Gabriel and his family do not live on Narkiss Street in West Jerusalem. Occasionally, however, they can be spotted at Focaccia on Rabbi Akiva Street, one of my favorite restaurants in Jerusalem.

Like most Americans, I was raised to be a white man. I read William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. I read F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Bukowski. I came to identify with the emotionally disengaged characters, the staccato sentences, the irreverent dirty old man voice. The books I read asked me to imagine the power I might have. I got a woman pregnant and then worried that they wouldn't get an abortion, tying me down forever when all I wanted to do was continue experiencing my freedom. I wrote poems about the absurdity of writing poems, enjoying the decadence of imagining my readers drinking in my disregard for them. Being likable, explaining myself to others were not prerequisites of protaganism. I watched women move, their hips and dresses, their lips on glasses, their breasts heaving, all that offered up to me to enjoy, to consume. The fact that I was a brown woman was not something that seemed immediately relevant when I was younger. I moved through the world with the sense that I would have the same kind of power as the protagonists I read and movies I watched.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” ---F. Scott Fitzgerald “When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something...but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.” ---Joan Didion “The world is better off with some people gone.  Our lives are not all interconnected.  That theory is crock.  Some people truly do not need to be here.” ---Patrick Bateman

Samuel Johnson once explained how alcohol compensated for sexual deprivation. When asked what he thought was the greatest pleasure in life, he replied: “Fucking; and the second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink tho’ not all could fuck.

In Paris in the 1920s, he bought Beaune by the gallon at a wine cooperative, and would and did drink five or six bottles of red at a meal. He taught Scott Fitzgerald to drink wine direct from the bottle which, he said, was like ‘a girl going swimming without her swimming suit’. In New York he was ‘cockeyed’ he said for ‘several days’ after signing his contract for The Sun Also Rises, probably his first prolonged bout. He was popularly supposed to have invented the Twenties’ phrase ‘Have a drink’; though some, such as Virgil Thomson, accused him of being mean about offering one and Hemingway, in turn, was always liable to accuse acquaintances of free-loading, as he did Ken Tynan in Cuba in the 1950s.