58 Famous Writers And Their Addictions

The Coffee Club

1. Honore de Balzac used to drink 50 cups of coffee a day. He woke at 1 a.m. each day and wrote for seven hours. At 8 a.m. he napped for 90 minutes, then wrote again from 9:30 to 4. He said: ‘As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.’
2. Søren Kierkegaard had an interesting coffee ritual. He poured sugar into a coffee cup until it was piled up above the rim. Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid. Then he gulped the whole thing down in one go.
3. Voltaire was said to have drunk 30 – 40 cups of coffee (mixed with chocolate) every day.
4. Gertrude Stein also loved coffee.  She wrote: ‘Coffee gives you time to think. It’s a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup.’
5. Benjamin Franklin had high standards for his coffee. He said:  ’Among the numerous luxuries of the table…coffee may be considered as one of the most valuable. It excites cheerfulness without intoxication; and the pleasing flow of spirits which it occasions…is never followed by sadness, languor or debility.’
6. Alexander Pope enjoyed coffee. He said: ‘Coffee, which makes the politician wise, and see through all things with his half-shut eyes.’
7. Jean Jacques Rousseau said:  ’Ah, that is a perfume in which I delight; when they roast coffee near my house, I hasten to open the door to take in all the aroma.’
8. Dave Barry wrote: ‘It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity.’
9. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe was an enthusiastic coffee drinker.
10. Jonathan Swift needed coffee at least once a week to write. He said: ‘The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it. While you continue to be splenetic, count upon it I will always preach. Thus much I sympathise with you that I am not cheerful enough to write, for I believe Coffee once a week is necessary to that.’

Animal House

1. Edgar Allan Poe wrote with his cat on his shoulders.
2. Charles Baudelaire wrote with a pet bat in a cage on his writing desk.
3. Henrik Ibsen wrote with a pet scorpion close by.
4. Charles Dickens had a beloved pet raven named Grip. He had Grip taxidermied after he died.
5. Flannery O’Connor had many beloved peacocks.
6. Vladimir Nabokov chased butterflies.

The Drugged

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge took two grains of opium before writing.
2. Jean Cocteau wrote Opium: The Diary of His Cure to document his recovery by way of day-to-day journal entries. He said: ‘To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving.’
3. Elizabeth Barrett Browning enjoyed her daily dose of opium.
4. Hunter S. Thompson was addicted to hallucinogenics and cocaine.
5. Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead using the amphetamine Benzedrine as an anti-fatigue drug.
6. William S. Burroughs found plenty to write about with his heroin addiction.
7. George Carlin was known for his drug abuse, which included pharmaceuticals, marijuana, and cocaine.
8. Allen Ginsberg used nitrous oxide and marijuana to get him into what he called ‘an exalted state of mind’.
9. Charles Baudelaire enjoyed marijuana and opium.
10. Aleister Crowley gave many detailed descriptions of his lifelong experiences with heroin, morphine, mescaline, marijuana, cocaine, ether, and opium.
11. John Keats was addicted to opium.
12. Norman Mailer was a drug addict and alcoholic. He was arrested multiple times, punched fellow writer Gore Vidal in the face, and stabbed at least one of his six wives.
13. Philip K. Dick‘s drug of choice was amphetamine: everything from crystal meth to dextroamphetamine.
14. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote 60 000 words in six days using cocaine.
15. Aldous Huxley took large amounts of mescaline. He also experimented with LSD and mushrooms.
16. Ken Kesey became a lifelong psychedelic drug advocate.
17. Thomas de Quincey lived his opium addiction. He wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
18. David Foster Wallace was addicted to anti-depressants and alcohol. He committed suicide by hanging himself when he was 46.

The Drunken

1. Paul Verlaine spent his days drinking absinthe in Paris cafes.
2. Eugene O’Neill battled alcoholism for many years.
3. Raymond Chandler abused alcohol for the entire duration of his writing career.
4. Dorothy Parker fought depression with alcohol. She said: ‘One more drink and I’ll be under the host.’
5. John Cheever, who said, ‘There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor’ eventually won his battle against alcohol.
6. F. Scott Fitzgerald became notorious for his heavy drinking, which left him in poor health by the late 1930s. He died when he was 44. ‘First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.’
7. Ernest Hemingway was a heavy drinker, succumbing to alcoholism in his later years. He said: ‘A man does not exist until he is drunk.’
8. Jack Kerouac died of cirrhosis of the liver, the result of a lifetime of heavy drinking. He said: ‘I’m Catholic and I can’t commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death.’
9. Hunter S. Thompson became famous for his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He said: ‘I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs, or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.’
10. James Joyce‘s drinking episodes occasionally caused fights in the local pubs.
11. Charles Bukowski had a life-long affair with alcohol.
12. William Faulkner only abstained from drinking while he was writing. He said: ‘There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others.’
13. Carson McCullers‘ marriage and remarriage to an alcoholic writer, Reeves McCullers, did not help her own battles with addiction.
14. Truman Capote said, “I drink, because it’s the only time I can stand it.’
15. Dylan Thomas who said, ‘An alcoholic is someone you don’t like, who drinks as much as you do’, died an alcoholic.
16. Tennessee Williams fought alcohol addiction his whole life. He said, ‘O’Neill had a terrible problem with alcohol. Most writers do. American writers nearly all have problems with alcohol.’
17. O. Henry, who died an alcoholic, kept his real identity as a writer a secret.
18. Mary Karr, who struggled with alcohol 20 years ago said, ‘I couldn’t sleep through the night without a tumbler of watered-down whiskey by my bedside.’

Everything

1. Stephen King spent the 1980s in a haze of beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine, Xanax, Valium, Nyquil, dextromethorphan (cough medicine), and marijuana. He has since sobered up.

Have we missed any strange addictions? Please leave your suggestions in the comments section below.

 by Amanda Patterson
© Amanda Patterson

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