This list at Life of “literary drunks & addicts” casts a wide and somewhat ungenerous net. (It includes Louisa May Alcott because she got hooked on morphine after contracting typhoid fever as a nurse during the Civil War.) But it was worth scrolling through for some choice quotes about the drinking habit.

For instance, Brendan Behan: “I only take a drink on two occasions: when I’m thirsty and when I’m not.”

And one of Dorothy Parker’s famous lines: “One more drink and I’ll be under the host.”

But if pith isn’t your thing, there’s the far more blunt Charles Baudelaire (pictured above, looking just as you’d expect the person who issued this quote to look): “Always be drunk. . . . Get drunk militantly. Just get drunk.”