23 July 2013

Drink.


It was during this term that I began to realize that Sebastian was a drunkard in quite a different sense from myself.  I got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enhance it; Sebastian drank to escape.

- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Does it help writers to drink? Certainly Jack Kerouac, Dylan Thomas, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald thought so. But are the words on the page there despite and not because of alcohol?

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