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Tag Archives: Alcoholism

Martin Amis: Why Are So Many Writers Drinkers?

14 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview

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Alcohol, Alcoholism, Anatol Yusef, booze, Creativity, drinking, Drugs, interview, Interview Magazine, John Freeman, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, PEN World Voices Festival, Smoking, wine, Writing

Martin Amis

Interviewer: Why have you been less interested in writing about drugs than you have about drink? Does it have to do with how you grew up? Your father hasn’t exactly avoided booze as a subject.

Martin Amis: Yes, he’s a serious drinker. Drink, like sex, tells us an extra thing about someone. It strikes me more and more that we don’t really know much about each other, even people we know well. We keep so much hidden. You put the 10% on display: the rest is all secret. And when people are drunk, you find out another 10%; and when you discover what someone is like intimately, you discover another 10%, or maybe more.

Interviewer: I don’t know if drugs give you another 10%. Sometimes I think drugs remove something.

Martin Amis: Or obscure the original 10%, yes. In my early novels, people smoke dope and stuff, but alcohol is something everyone has an attitude towards, especially in New York where it seems everyone has stopped drinking.

Interviewer: Smoking, too.

Martin Amis: You’re more efficient when you don’t drink. But also you keep that other 10%. Someone from New York said to me not long ago, ‘You produce an awful lot, are you a workaholic?’ I said, ‘No I’m an alcoholic.’

In fact I’m not an alcoholic, but drink is present every day of my life in those few glasses of wine at the end of the day. When people say that I often think it means a few bottles. Funnily enough, a mild hangover is often a good start in order to write. I think the reason writers do drink a lot, almost without exception — American novelists, if they’re not Jewish or alcoholics — is that writers have time to recover. You haven’t got to get up the next morning. And perhaps, more than most people, you do want an escape from yourself.

__________

Excerpted from a 1976 interview with Martin Amis.

While its original text is not available on the web, this exchange was recently reenacted at the PEN World Voices Festival by Amis, John Freeman, and Anatol Yusef.

Martin Amis Christophers Hitchens

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William F. Buckley on Legalizing Drugs

29 Thursday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Politics

≈ Comments Off on William F. Buckley on Legalizing Drugs

Tags

Addiction, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Bordeaux, Cocaine, Conservative, Conservativism, Drug Legalization, Drugs, Freedom, Government, Heroin, interview, justice, Law, Law Enforcement, Legal System, Legalization, Legalizing Drugs, libertarianism, Marijuana, Narcotics, police, politics, Public Health, Public Policy, Richard Heffner, The Open Mind, William F. Buckley, wine

William F. Buckley

“First of all, please don’t confuse my position with that of people who are indifferent to drugs. I’m not indifferent to drugs. I think I’ve been quoted as saying if I could turn a single latch which would make all the drugs disappear from the face of the earth, with the exception of here and there, a vineyard in Bordeaux, I would turn that latch.

Now, you say is it inconsistent for a conservative to take my position. I don’t think it is, because a conservative seeks to be grounded in reality. That which works is quantifiable; that which simply does not work, isn’t. If you were to pass a law requiring people to go to church on Sunday, it wouldn’t work. Under the circumstances, you would eventually simply withdraw such a law. My position on drugs is that our drug laws aren’t working, and that more net damage is being done by their continuation than would be done by withdrawing them from the books. This, as I say, should not be confused as a sanction for drugs. Drugs are a form of escapism, and the damage in taking them is not by any means self-limited. It damages other people also. For that reason, the question is: How do you diminish the net harm done by drugs?[…]

Anybody who becomes an alcoholic, which is probably the primary curse of this country, in my judgment, is morally stigmatized by permitting himself to get into that condition. That is not an argument for prohibition. Adultery is widely practiced. So is fornication. You can simultaneously say it’s morally wrong, but we’re not going to tell the police to open the doors of every motel to find out whether the people inside have marriage licenses.”

__________

William F. Buckley, speaking in an interview on Richard Heffner’s The Open Mind on August 6th, 1996.

More on various vices:

  • Richard Burton discusses how alcohol pushed him to the brink of death
  • Noam Chomsky explains what the lottery can teach us about the drug war
  • Former addict Will Self reflects on the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman

William F Buckley

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