Perhaps the activity people most associate with Christopher Hitchens, outside of wit and rhetorical ability, was proclivity to drink alcohol constantly and in large doses. His "work lunches" were famous for beginning at noon and ending at 3 am. Speaking of lunch, he once said that he had the same thing for lunch everyday: "two glasses of red wine. Sometimes more. Never less."
With that, we'll get to every quote we could find, in print, of Christopher Hitchens on Alcohol.
It’s a master-servant relationship. I’ll leave it to you which is which.
I’ll be fifty-four in April, and everyone keeps asking how I do it. How I do what? I’m never completely sure what the questioner means. I hope they mean how do I manage to keep producing books, writing essays, making radio and television appearances at all hours, traveling all over the place with no sign of exhaustion, and a near-Godlike physique that is the envy of many of my juniors. Sometimes, though, I suppose they mean how do I do all this and still drink enough every day to kill or stun the average mule?
I follow medical advice in only one respect, which is to make sure that I swallow the two shots of alcoholic medicine that doctors now agree is essential for the heart and arteries.
Nobody who knows me thinks that I drink too little, and I could probably stand to imbibe less. It’s both an advantage and a disadvantage to have a tolerance for alcohol. But I sometimes wonder what those who don’t know me must think. The reputation now approaches legendary.
It wasn’t all that easy to get a reputation for boozing when you worked in and around old Fleet Street, where the hardened hands would spill more just getting the stuff to their lips than most people imbibe in a week, but I managed it.
The most lethal and fascistic of our current enemies-the purist murders of the Islamic jihad-despise our society for, among other things, its tolerance of alcohol. We should perhaps do more to earn this hatred and contempt, and less to emulate it.
An opened flask of alcohol is a mouth that can lead to hell as well as heaven.
The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring.
Having long been annoyed by people who called knowingly for, say ‘a Dewar’s and water’ instead of a scotch and water, I decided to ask a trust man barman what I got if I didn’t specify a brand or label. The answer was a confidential jerk of the thumb in the direction of a villainous-looking, tartan-shaded jug under the bar. The situation was even grimmer with gin and vodka and became abysmal with clear preference, then you drink is like a bad game of poker or a hasty drug transaction: It is whatever the dealer says it is. Please do try to bear this in mind.
Alcohol is a good friend but a bad master.
Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing.
Cheap booze is a false economy.
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