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Writers and booze.

We all know the cliché of the alcoholic writer. Lots of painters drank like fish, but for some reason people like to think of drunken writers. It’s romantic somehow. Like tuberculosis. How anyone thinks vomiting and/or coughing up bits of your lung is “romantic” truly escapes me.

But I am a sucker for anecdotes and this little article has a few good ones.

In the early 1980s, Norman Mailer was asked by director Sergio Leone to write a screenplay. Mailer showed his enthusiasm by locking himself in a hotel room for three weeks with a case of whiskey. Leone, says a biographer, recalled hearing Mailer in his room “singing, cursing and shouting for ice cubes.” He did not use the script.

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