10 known writers suffering dependencies

Many people do not have the most useful habits - this also applies to one of the most prominent figures in the literature, which were hopeless addicts, some of them "hooked" on the coffee, some - opium, someone was ashamed of his addiction, someone - no . We offer you a selection of ten writers who were sick with various addictions.

1. Honore de Balzac

The dependence of coffee.

Related statements: "Many people say that coffee inspires them, but, as you know, coffee makes boring people even more boring."

Balzac drank about 50 cups of coffee per day, and later this was not enough for him, and he began to have dry ground coffee. The writer himself described this method of beverage consumption as follows:

"Terrible and cruel method that I could recommend only men of unusual strength, men with thick black hair and covered with pigment spots skin, men with big square hands and feet in the form of pins."

Balzac wrote about coffee as follows:

"Coffee makes the finest of the stomach wall to spur a racehorse; they become inflamed; Sparks permeate the entire body up to the brain. From that moment everything becomes exciting. Ideas begin to move and begin to march as the battalions of the Grand Army in the Great War. Thoughts rise up to the sky, as the flags on the highest flagpole; cavalry of metaphor unfolds in a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic shoots all the cartridges from the military covered wagons; by order of the imagination of the arrow of open fire; Ink spread over the paper - night work begins and ends with black in these streams, the battle starts and ends with black powder. "

2. Lord Byron

Addiction: sex.

Related statements: "Oh, the love of women! As you know, she is beautiful and terrible "(a line from the poem" Don Juan ").

Lord Byron was obsessed with sex: during his time in Venice he was the year slept with 250 women, let alone men. He seduced Lady Caroline Lamb, speaking of him as a "very mad, bad, and dangerous man ever known her," her cousin Anna, which later married, and his own half-sister.

Of course, 250 women per year can be considered a desire to pass for a hero-lover, but Byron left on each of his lover memory - a strand of pubic hair of his partner. These trophies poet kept in carefully sealed envelopes with the indication of his or her name - envelopes have been found recently in the rest in his home library.

3. Elizabeth Browning

dependence: opium.

Related statements: "Opium, opium - night after night!"

Elizabeth Browning started using opium when she was only 15 years old, to numb the pain from spinal injuries, and after 30, she suffered from heart disease and lung and drink tincture of opium as an anesthetic: in 1845, the year she drank 40 drops opium tincture per day - a huge dose. She wrote to her troubled brother

"My opium helps me to keep from trembling and fainting ... helps me to maintain composure and balance the nervous system. I do not accept it to set the mood in the usual sense, and you do not have to think - is doubtful, Miss Browning, doubtful! ".

4. Paul Verlaine

Addiction: absinthe. Related statements: "I drink it with sugar!"

Absinthe addicted to many famous geniuses - Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, - but the latter is especially appreciated it when them with Rimbaud novel was interrupted on the initiative of Rimbaud, Verlaine drunk to unconsciousness and in a fit of rage shot in the arm to the former lover, having got it on two years to jail. At the end of his life, poor and lonely, Verlaine refused all his vices - except absinthe, of course: the legend says that he drank it, even lying on his deathbed.

5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Addiction: gambling.

Related statements: "Even going to the igopnoy hall, two rooms, only that I zaslyshu dzenkane peppered money - almost made seizures with me" (from "The Player" of the novel).

Mid-1860s began a difficult period in the life of Dostoevsky: first his wife died, then a brother, and he was alone - in a depression and a variety of personal and family debt. He was addicted to gambling, in particular, to roulette, which, by itself, did not help him, there is a legend that he tried as "Crime and Punishment" as soon as possible to finish because terribly needed in advance from the publisher, and at the same time the "Player" written to pay off his gambling debts.

6. Ayn Rand

Addiction: amphetamines

Related statements: "Is there a doubt that addiction is an escape from the unbearable inner state of the reality that it is impossible to deal with, from the atrophy of the mind, never fully stops?"

During its work on the "source" Ayn Rand was prescribed amphetamine Benzedrine as a drug to combat fatigue, and since then she has taken various amphetamines on a daily basis for 30-plus years, arguing sometimes, they need it in order to control weight. Many of her relatives told her about her volatile mood, caused by the influence of drugs, and begged her to stop, but Ayn Rand did not care.

7. James Joyce

Addiction: flatulence.

Related statements: "It seems to me that Nora can fart anywhere. I think that would drag her into a room full of farts women. Her girlish noise not like the wet windy flatulence, which, in my opinion, is typical for fatty women. He suddenly dry and dirty, as something that can make a young girl in a residential housing dormitories at night. I hope Nora will be no end to fart in my face, so I can smell it. "

Joyce really addicted to flatulence his wife: if you read his letters to her, you know that Joyce had a flatulence more than a fleeting interest. Rather, he was kind of obsessed, but maybe, dirty phrases, performed in his letters of this angst, characterize him as a dependent.

8. William Burroughs

Addiction: heroin.

Related statements: "Whether you sniff it, smoke or puts it in the ass; the result is - drug addiction. "

Heroin addiction Burroughs is not a big secret: he took it almost all his life, and many of the most famous of his works - is for the most part half-autobiographical reflection on their own experiences with drugs. Burroughs even selling heroin in Greenwich Village in the 1940s, but by the time of his death, he still resorted to methadone maintenance treatment.

9. Charles Dickens

Addiction: morgue.

Related statements: "I am struck by an unknown force of the morgue."

Dickens could be in the morgue all day, watching the way the corpses are brought, reveal, prepared for burial and stored. Dickens was not the first creative person, carried away the corpses, because such people often feel the need to sneak to study human nature. Dickens described the force that leads him to the morgue over and over again, as the "attraction repulsive", but for the people around them, and for him it is not serious.

10. Ernest Hemingway

Addiction: alcohol.

Related statements: "Always do sober what had sworn to do, being drunk. This will teach you to keep your mouth shut. "

Although, of course, many great writers were alcoholics (Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and this list could go on), Hemingway alcohol was a way of life - most of it he spent in a state of alcoholic intoxication.

The writer began drinking in the 1950s after a series of injuries in car accidents. His habits were legendary, and he is credited with the invention of a few alcoholic drinks, including daiquiris and mojitos; at least, it is safe to say that it has created a cocktail of Hemingway "Papa Double".